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Quotes from The Trouble With Being Born — Emil Cioran

1911–1995 France

← All quotes by Emil Cioran

99 quotes

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

What are you waiting for in order to give up?

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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 (1973)

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.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Emil Cioran (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.