Cioran

Thinking about C., for who drinking coffee is the only reason to exist. One day, with a trembling voice, I was extolling Buddhism, he answered: "Nirvana, yes, but not without coffee."
We all have some mania that stops us from unreservedly accepting complete happines.

Cow urine was the only medicine monks had permission to use in the early Buddhist communities. A most sensible measure. If one covets peace, one will attain it only in rejecting whatever may cause trouble, whatever man has grafted onto his original simplicity, his original health. Nothing speaks of our fall more eloquently than the spectacle of a drugstore: remedies for every ailment but the essential one, which no human nostrum will ever cure.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

Without excessive overconfidence, I think that as regards perception, and even the experience of emptiness, I went as far as several Buddhist or Tibetan hermits - because everything I do revolves around this fundamental unreality.

On the mantelpiece, the photograph of a chimpanzee and a statuette of the Buddha. This proximity, more accidental than intentional, makes me wonder over and over where my place might be between these two extrems, man's pre and transfiguration.

,I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at dose range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs-between a false promise and the end of all promises.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 151 -

,And our very being - what a mistake, what an injury to have adjoined it to existence, when we might have persevered, intact, in the virtual, the invulnerable! No-one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if ever there was one. Yet it is with the hope of being cured of it some day that we accept life and endure its ordeals. The years pass, the wound remains.''

- The Fall Into time, Quadrangle Books, 1970 (1964), page 69 -

,,It is our birth, in fact, that we must attend to if we want to extirpate the evil at its source. We take a stand against death, against what must come; birth, a much more irreparable event, we leave to one side, pay little or no attention to it: to each man it appears as far in the past as the world's first moment. Only a man who plans to suppress himself reaches back that far; it seems he cannot forget the unnamable mechanism of procreation and that he tries, by a retrospective horror, to annihilate the very seed from which he has sprung.''

- The Fall Into time, Quadrangle Books, 1970 (1964), pages 169-170 -

,,To procreate is to love the scourge - to seek to maintain and to augment it. They were right, those ancient philosophers who identified fire with the principle of the universe, and with desire, for desire burns, devours: annihilates: At once agent and destroyer of beings, it is sombre, it is infernal by essence.''

- The New Gods, University of Chicago, 2013 (1969), page 11 -

,,In the Council of 1211 against the Bogomils, those among them were anathematized who held that ,,woman conceives in her womb by the cooperation of Satan, that Satan abides there upon conception without withdrawing hence until the birth of the child.'' I dare not suppose that the Devil can be concerned with us to the point of keeping us company for so many months; but I cannot doubt that we have been conceived under his eyes and that he actually attended our beloved begetters.''

- The New Gods, University of Chicago, 2013 (1969), page 62 -

,,The disgust with the useful aspect of sexuality, the horror of procreation, constitutes part of the interrogation of the creation: what is the good of multiplying monsters?''

- The New Gods, University of Chicago, 2013 (1969), page 62 -

,,The mediocrity of my grief at funerals. Impossible to feel sorry for the deceased; conversely, every birth casts me into consternation. It is incomprehensible, it is insane that people can show a baby, that they can exhibit this potential disaster and rejoice over it.''

- The New Gods, University of Chicago, 2013 (1969), page 102 -

,,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, 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.''
- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 4 -

,,Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 4 -

,,To have committed every crime but that of being a father.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 6 -

,,If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 19 -

,,In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth". An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 33 -

,,Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 98 -

,,That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 157 -

,,If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 147 -

,,When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 181 -

,,Birth and chain are synonyms. To see the light of day, to see shackles...''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 211 -

,,Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.''

- The Trouble With Being Born, Sever Books, 1976 (1973), page 212 -

,,Birth, what an exile!''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,Anyone who lives is defeated and birth is a foretaste of capitulation.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,Every birth is a capitulation.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,The only thing I know - I flatter myself that I understood it already, when I was twenty years old - that one should not procreate.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,Crime is to transmit, through procreation, one’s frailties to someone else, to force someone to experience the same things we are experiencing: Gehenna, which may be even worse than our own. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my miseries.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -

,,Compassion makes you not want to be a ,,progenitor''. This is the cruelest word I know.''

- Cahiers, 1957-1972 -