Erasmo Cantu > Erasmo's Quotes

“No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”
― E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.”
― Émile Michel Cioran

“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Tell me how you want to die, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I would like to be free, totaly free... free like an aborted child.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.”
― Emil Cioran

“Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”
― Emil Cioran

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.”
― Emil Cioran

“We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.”
― E.M. Cioran

“I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...”
― Emil Cioran

“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.
We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?”, I now put the same question about anyone alive.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints