This little blind creature, only a few days old, turning its head every which way in search of something or other, this naked skull, this initial baldness, this tiny monkey that has sojourned for months in a latrine and that soon, forgetting its origins, will spit on the galaxies.

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

According to one Hindu legend, Shiva, at a particular moment, will begin to dance, at first slowly, then faster and faster, and will not stop before having imposed upon the world a frenzied cadence, in every respect opposed to that of Creation.

This legend includes no commentary, history having assumed the task of illustrating its obvious truth.

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naiveté, without which the arts can never begin again.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Nothing is 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.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

In certain men, everything, absolutely everything, derives from physiology: their body is their mind, their mind is their body.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

E. M. 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.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to rest on, to dissolve into. . . .

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

It is written in the Zohar: "When man appeared thereupon appeared the flowers." I suspect they were there long before him, and that his advent plunged them all into a stupefaction from which they have not yet recovered.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born