Practically Cynical

Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 12.

If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 25

He who hates himself is not humble.

For a long time I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madness, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 26.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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When Mara, the Tempter, tries to supplant the Buddha, the latter says, among other things: "By what right do you claim to rule over men and over the universe? Have you suffered for knowledge?
     This is the crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker. There is never too great a distinction made between those who have paid for the tiniest step toward knowledge and those, incomparably more numerous, who have received a convenient, indifferent knowledge, a knowledge without ordeals.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 27.

Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 33.

All these poems where it is merely the Poem that is in question — a whole poetry with no other substance than itself! What would we say of a prayer whose object was religion?
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 35.

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 37.

A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 50.

Whereas any sentence one has to write requires a pretense of invention, it takes little enough attention  to enter into a text, even a difficult one. To scribble a postcard comes closer to a creative activity than to read The Phenomenology of Mind.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 51.

What a bore, someone who doesn't deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don't want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 76.

A free man is one who has discerned the insanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 91.

Painful or wounding questions asked by the uncouth distress and anger us, and may have the same effect as certain techniques of Oriental meditation. Who knows if a dense, aggressive stupidity might not provoke illumination? It is certainly worth as much as a rap on the hand with a stick.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 111.

The unusual is not a criterion. Paganini is more surprising and more unpredictable than Bach.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 118.

What makes destruction suspect is its facility: anyone who comes along can excel in it. But if to destroy is easy, to destroy oneself is less so. Superiority of the outcast over the agitator or the anarchist.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 138.

"....the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing." I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it.
     Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this extraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse. Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 172.

Man has said what he had to say. He should rest now. But refuses, and though he has entered into his "survivor" phase, he figits as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 176.

That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. "Man," we read in the Dhammapada, "is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are."
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 188.

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them....
— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 202.