Educators From France

"Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all."

"Basically—I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs—life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything."

"Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable."

"The source of an emotion is very difficult to grasp, but it comes to just that. That holds for all phenomena, for faith, etc. Why did it begin, how did it develop? and so forth—only he who has the gift of divination can perceive where it really comes from. But it is not accessible to reflection."

"With success and a literary career one becomes an unquestioning part of the mechanism, whereas the only truly important years are those in which one is unknown."

"I love talking to simple people, with common folk, if you like, and I still do it and still chat now as before with anyone, regardless of intellectual level. On the contrary, I like uneducated people much better and that is obviously my Rumanian heritage."

"I have a weakness for cemeteries, though they aren't so beautiful anymore, because they are simply overpopulated! When I meet friends or people I know who are going through a difficult period, I usually have this advice for them: "Go for twenty minutes in acemetery and you'll see that, though your worry won't disappear, you'll almost forget about it and you'll feel better." Just a few days ago I told a young woman who was suffering fearfully from an unhappy love, "Since you don't live far from Montparnasse, take a walk through the cemetery, just half an hour, and you will see that your misery will appear bearable." In such a situation, it is much better to do that than to go to a doctor; there is no medicine that can help. To visit a cemetery in such a situation is a lesson, a lesson in wisdom! I have always practiced such methods, or recommended them, although it may not seem altogether serious, but it has been effective in every case. What can one say that is meaningful to someone in despair? Absolutely nothing, or almost nothing. My advice shows immediate results."

"I know several writers, young writers, who tried to publish something and were frustrated, whereupon they wanted to take their lives. I understand that in some way, but it is exceptionally difficult to comfort someone who is so far gone. The most shocking things in life are perhaps the great defeats, and there are many of them, for everyone. When one gets to know people in that situation, one experiences the most of them. I am very often visited by people in complete despair, mostly young, who feel that they have failed. It is quite an extraordinarily important lesson, for there are people for whom it is not easy to go through such a crisis; it is a matter of sensitivity, of nerves, possibly even something inherited. Nevertheless, there are these crises in every social sphere and one must say that, fundamentally, failure merely constitutes the experience of life. That is really not so bad for the one who comprehends everything—what can happen to him? But it hits the ambitious exceptionally hard, those who have a plan for their lives, who think about the future, who have a future. Just because they take everything so seriously, I say to these people, "Go to the cemetery!" and it is right, and the results prove it. It is the only weapon with which to minimize such an essentially tragic situation.... Best of all, go find the grave of a friend! It is perhaps absurd and yet it has not only meaning, but is, as I said, the only way to alleviate a personal drama. One learns in life just about everything but this, how to survive such a crisis. And in literary circles, which are often afflicted in this regard, there is certainly a lot of disappointment."

"As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I've read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti."

"...the greatest French writer to honour our language since the death of Paul Valery."

"...the most distinguished figure in the tradition since Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein."

"As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all too easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be "stimulated," into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, "the man who unmasks his fictions" through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture "renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth." There, he concludes, "no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.""

""At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm.", essay 2 - On not wanting to live"

"Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them."

"We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to."

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

"Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease."

"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!"

"As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy."

"Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?"

"One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living."

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

"Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation."

"The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor."

"Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what..."

"Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others."

"We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy."

"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."

"An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it."

"The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions."

"What are you waiting for in order to give up?"

"I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable."

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

"It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."

"It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition."

"Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil."

"I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations."

"The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools."

"We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface..."

"It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant."

"If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself."

"Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember."

"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."

"The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity..."

"We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented — we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt — tone is more than talent, it is its essence."

"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."

"Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself."

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

"Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?"

"I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free."