Education: LUCID PESSIMISM: A CIORAN SAMPLER

∙I was, I am, I will be, me is a question of grammar and not of existence.

∙To live here is death; elsewhere, suicide. Where can one go?

∙Every tormented person in the West makes one think of a hero of Dostoevsky with a bank account.

∙Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven’t been cut off.

∙We are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet’s equal there.

∙The history of ideas is no more than a parade of labels converted into so many absolutes.

∙At any price, we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.

∙It is from self-hatred that consciousness emerges. I hate myself: I am absolutely a man.

∙Worn threadbare, Christianity no longer inconveniences the mind nor enforces the least interrogation; the anxieties it provokes, like its answers and its solutions, are flabby, soporific. Already we yawn over the Cross.

∙An individual, like a people, like a continent, dies out when he shrinks from both rash plans and rash acts, when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within it, takes refuge there.

∙We can never punish [St. Paul] enough for making Christianity impolite, for saddling it with the nastiest traditions of the Old Testament: intolerance, brutality, provincialism. He was the first barker of the Greco-Roman world. Whenever I am at a loss for a scapegoat, I open the Epistles and am quickly reassured. I have my man, and he rouses me to a fury.

∙Poets: uselessly solemn, infatuated, or odious, monsters, specialists, tormentors, and martyrs of the adjective whose dilettantism, lucidity and intellectual sensibility I had vastly overestimated.

∙Let us surrender to all rebellions: they will end by turning against themselves, against us … Perhaps then we shall regain our supremacy over time; unless, the other way around, struggling to escape the calamity of consciousness, we rejoin animals, plants, things, return to that primordial stupidity of which, through the fault of history, we have lost even the memory.

∙I cling to the world no better than a ring on a skeleton’s finger.