EM Cioran

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 30 Jul 2023 03:10
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    • Nihilist, pessimist, skeptic – hard to describe his acidic eye, dissolving of all pieties.
    • Having lost the monopoly on stagnation, they grow increasingly frantic and will inevitably topple like their models, like those feverish civilizations incapable of lasting more than a dozen centuries. Long Now
      • – Drawn and Quartered p7
    • Never make things easier for the reader. He will not thank you for your trouble. It is not understanding that he likes – he likes to mark time, to get stuck, he likes to be punished. Whence the perennial appeal of certain murky authors, whence the perennial appeal of the hodgepodge.
      • – Drawn and Quartered p64
    • I am a "being" by metaphor; if I were one in fact, I should remain so forever, and death, stripped of meaning, would have no hold on me. "Labor ceaselessly for your salvation" — that is, don't forget that you are a fugitive assemblage, a composite whose ingredients are only waiting to come apart. Salvation, indeed, has a meaning only if we are provisional to the point of mockery; if there were the slightest principle of duration in us, we should have been forever saved or lost; no more quest, no more horizon. If deliverance matters at all, our unreality is a real godsend.
      • – The New Gods, p69
    • The sage, as the East has always known, refuses to make plans, never projects....To tell the truth, you make plans, but it revolts you to carry them out. The more you brood over one, the more you feel, abandoning it, a well-being which can reach the point of ecstasy.
      • – The New Gods, p72
    • To abide by the void – is this not also a form of pursuit? No doubt, but it is to pursue the absence of pursuit, to aim at a goal which sets aside all the others from the start. We live in anxiety because no goal can satisfy us, because over all our desires, and a fortiori over being as such, floats a fatality which necessarily affects those accidents which are individuals.
      • – The New Gods, p73
    • The more we consider the Buddha's last exhortation, 'Death is inherent in all created things, labor ceaselessly for your salvation' the more we are troubled by the impossibility of feeling ourselves as an aggregate, a transitory if not fortuitous combination of elements.
      • – The Undelivered, quoted in Ligotti's Conspiracy Against the Human Race