Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Emil Cioran, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Emil Cioran quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 274 Emil Cioran quotes for you to read and share.

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Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure. -- Emil Cioran
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It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us. -- Emil Cioran
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We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence. -- Emil Cioran
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I've never practiced a profession and have lived like a sort of student. I consider this my greatest success, my life hasn't been a failure because I succeeded in doing nothing. -- Emil Cioran
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Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time. -- Emil Cioran
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Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved. -- Emil Cioran
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory. -- Emil Cioran
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The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion. -- Emil Cioran
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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart. -- Emil Cioran
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A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man. -- Emil Cioran
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I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide ... -- Emil Cioran
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To the chosen people God ensured eternity through hatred. -- Emil Cioran
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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered. -- Emil Cioran
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The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. -- Emil Cioran
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I would like to be free, totaly free ... free like an aborted child. -- Emil Cioran
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A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people. -- Emil Cioran
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In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth." An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin. -- Emil Cioran
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The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul. -- Emil Cioran
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Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing. -- Emil Cioran
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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods. -- Emil Cioran
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To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker. -- Emil Cioran
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Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy. -- Emil Cioran
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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? -- Emil Cioran
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Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic. -- Emil Cioran
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All knowledge pushed to its limit can be dangerous, and morbid, because life is endurable solely because we don't see it through to the end. An undertaking is only possible if we have conserved a minimum of illusions. Complete lucidity is the void! -- Emil Cioran
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How does it happen that in life as in literature, rebellion, however pure, has something false about it, whereas resignation, however tainted with listlessness, always gives the impression of authenticity -- Emil Cioran
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Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture. -- Emil Cioran
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Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it. -- Emil Cioran
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Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive. -- Emil Cioran
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For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened. ...
No sooner are they open than the drama beings. To look without understanding - that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. ... -- Emil Cioran
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I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside. -- Emil Cioran
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In all the edifices of thought, I have found no category on which to rest my head. Whereas Chaos - there's a pillow! -- Emil Cioran
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The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue. -- Emil Cioran
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When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer. -- Emil Cioran
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Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities. -- Emil Cioran
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After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets. -- Emil Cioran
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Impartiality is incompatible with the will to affirm oneself or quite simply with the will to exist. To acknowledge another's merits is an alarming symptom, an act against nature. -- Emil Cioran
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Essentially, boredom is centered upon time, on the horror of time, on the fear of time, the disclosure of time, the awareness of time. Those who are not aware of time passing do not get bored. It's not the time that passes, it's the time that doesn't pass. -- Emil Cioran
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Some of Mozart's Andantes emanate an ethereal desolation, a sort of dream funeral in another life. -- Emil Cioran
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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down. -- Emil Cioran
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He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention. -- Emil Cioran
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You kill yourself only if, in some respects, you have always been outside of it all. -- Emil Cioran
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The dead center of existence: when it is all the same to you whether you read a newspaper article or think about God. -- Emil Cioran
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Torn between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus. -- Emil Cioran
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Only false values prevail, because everyone can assimilate them, counterfeit them (false thereby to the second degree). An idea that succeeds is necessarily a pseudo-idea. -- Emil Cioran
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Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far -- Emil Cioran
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Shyness, inexhaustible source of misfortunes in practical life, is the direct cause, indeed unique, each inner wealth. -- Emil Cioran
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I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable. -- Emil Cioran
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Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die? -- Emil Cioran
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Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy! -- Emil Cioran
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As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think. -- Emil Cioran
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What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures? -- Emil Cioran
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We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage. -- Emil Cioran
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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God. -- Emil Cioran
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It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say "we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy. -- Emil Cioran
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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing. -- Emil Cioran
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend. -- Emil Cioran
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Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone. -- Emil Cioran
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility. -- Emil Cioran
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What is an argument for the defense that neither torments nor troubles - what is a eulogy that fails to kill? Every apology should be a murder by enthusiasm. -- Emil Cioran
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Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen. -- Emil Cioran
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To have committed every crime but that of being a father. -- Emil Cioran
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Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect. -- Emil Cioran
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If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy an even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it - so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse. -- Emil Cioran
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We are all deep in a hell, each of which is a miracle. -- Emil Cioran
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At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning. -- Emil Cioran
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But man is a strayed animal, and when he falls victim to doubt, if he should happen to take no further pleasure in attacking others, he turns on himself in order to inflict merciless tortures. -- Emil Cioran
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I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing". -- Emil Cioran
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It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerence -- Emil Cioran
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Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds. -- Emil Cioran
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws. -- Emil Cioran
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Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom! -- Emil Cioran
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The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness. -- Emil Cioran
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The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up. -- Emil Cioran
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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece. -- Emil Cioran
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The only way to reach another person at any depth is to move toward what is deepest in yourself. In other words, to take the opposite path from the one followed by so-called generous minds. -- Emil Cioran
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There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both. -- Emil Cioran
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What misery a sensation is! Ecstasy itself, perhaps, is nothing more. -- Emil Cioran
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Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger
phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of
time; life, again, a disease of matter.
Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself
is only an infirmity of God. -- Emil Cioran
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Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth. -- Emil Cioran
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His sterility was infinite: it partook of ecstasy. -- Emil Cioran
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To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known. -- Emil Cioran
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Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist - a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist - only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression. -- Emil Cioran
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I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter word "truth"! -- Emil Cioran
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The contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer. -- Emil Cioran
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The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable. -- Emil Cioran
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Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself. -- Emil Cioran
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You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life. -- Emil Cioran
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If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable. -- Emil Cioran
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I would like to forget everything, to forget myself and to forget the world. -- Emil Cioran
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The "west"-what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles ... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end? -- Emil Cioran
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Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.
Both theses are equally well-founded, hence equally true, as each of us can discover for himself in the space of an hour, sometimes of a minute. ... -- Emil Cioran
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In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life. -- Emil Cioran
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Bitterness, principle of your determination, your mode of action, and understanding, is the one fixed point in your oscillation between disgust for the world and self-pity. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason. -- Emil Cioran
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An existence transfigured by failure. -- Emil Cioran
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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me. -- Emil Cioran
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice. -- Emil Cioran
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living. -- Emil Cioran
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I wonder through the days like a whore in a world with no sidewalks. -- Emil Cioran
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Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear. -- Emil Cioran
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I dream of a world where one could die for a comma. -- Emil Cioran
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The mystics and their "collected works." When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn't read ... -- Emil Cioran
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When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured. -- Emil Cioran
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His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse. -- Emil Cioran
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To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy. -- Emil Cioran
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One should live and die where one was born ... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu? -- Emil Cioran
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Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure! Morality can only make life a long series of missed opportunities. -- Emil Cioran
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We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon-this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing. -- Emil Cioran
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I try
without success
to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority. -- Emil Cioran
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We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tete-a-tete with what is left of ourselves. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless. -- Emil Cioran
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Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it? -- Emil Cioran
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For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse. -- Emil Cioran
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It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. -- Emil Cioran
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Are we to execrate our age- or all ages?
Do we think of Buddha as withdrawing from the world on account of his contemporaries? -- Emil Cioran
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If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?", I now put the same question about anyone alive. -- Emil Cioran
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A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society -- Emil Cioran
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To accomplish nothing and die of the strain -- Emil Cioran
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At the climax of failure, at the moment when shame is about to do us in, suddenly we are swept away by a frenzy of pride which lasts only long enough to drain us, to leave us without energy, to lower, with our powers, the intensity of our shame. -- Emil Cioran
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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 do do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough. -- Emil Cioran
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I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool. -- Emil Cioran
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Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith. -- Emil Cioran
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I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony. -- Emil Cioran
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The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is. -- Emil Cioran
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A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger. -- Emil Cioran
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We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication. -- Emil Cioran
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Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes. -- Emil Cioran
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Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself. -- Emil Cioran
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We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job ... -- Emil Cioran
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death? -- Emil Cioran
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If there was a common, even official form of killing oneself, suicide would be much easier and much more frequent. But since to be done with it all we must find our own way, we waste so much time meditating on trifles that we forget what is essential. -- Emil Cioran
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A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim. -- Emil Cioran
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I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world. -- Emil Cioran
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. -- Emil Cioran
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Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being. -- Emil Cioran
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We tell our troubles to someone only to make him suffer, to make him assume them for himself. If we wanted to win him over, we would admit none but abstract worries, the only kind those who love us are eager to hear. -- Emil Cioran
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This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant. -- Emil Cioran
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The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist. -- Emil Cioran
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And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity? -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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In my early youth - he would later write to his friend, the philosopher Constantin Noica - seduced me solely the libraries and the brothels. -- Emil Cioran
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I have never had a goal, I have sought out no result. I think that there cannot be, in general just as well as for ourselves, neither goal nor result. Everything isn't without meaning - the word slightly puts me off- but without necessity. -- Emil Cioran
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How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world! -- Emil Cioran
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Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions. -- Emil Cioran
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To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness. -- Emil Cioran
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I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy. -- Emil Cioran
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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world. -- Emil Cioran
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Characteristic of sickness to stay awake when everything sleeps, when everything is at rest, even the sick man. -- Emil Cioran
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As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad ... -- Emil Cioran
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Nothing desiccates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas. -- Emil Cioran
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Extraordinary and null - these two adjectives apply to the sexual act, and, consequently, to everything resulting from it, to life first of all. -- Emil Cioran
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Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay -- Emil Cioran
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If the waves were to start thinking, they would believe that they are moving forward, that they have a purpose, that they are working for the good of the sea, and they wouldn't fail to work out a philosophy as inane as their zeal. -- Emil Cioran
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself. -- Emil Cioran
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Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women. -- Emil Cioran
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The mind advances only if it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen. -- Emil Cioran
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Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget. -- Emil Cioran
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void. -- Emil Cioran
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If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot. -- Emil Cioran
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows. -- Emil Cioran
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I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known. -- Emil Cioran
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What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears. -- Emil Cioran
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One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world. -- Emil Cioran
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Agression is a trait common to men and new gods. -- Emil Cioran
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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action. -- Emil Cioran
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I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. -- Emil Cioran
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What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification. -- Emil Cioran
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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise. -- Emil Cioran
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We are ourselves only by the sum of our failures. -- Emil Cioran
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There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time. -- Emil Cioran
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Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being. -- Emil Cioran
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In flawed families, a scion appears who dedicates himself to the truth and who ruins himself in its pursuit. -- Emil Cioran
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What do you do from morning to night?"
"I endure myself. -- Emil Cioran
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Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next. -- Emil Cioran
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To look for a meaning in anything is less the act of a naif than of a masochist. -- Emil Cioran
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If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth. -- Emil Cioran
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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home? -- Emil Cioran
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The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous. -- Emil Cioran
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything! -- Emil Cioran
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I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero. -- Emil Cioran
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live
moreover, the only one. -- Emil Cioran
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Not to have been born, merely musing on that - what freedom, what space! -- Emil Cioran
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We begin to live authentically only where philosophy ends, at its wreck, when we have understood its terrible nullity, when we have understood that it was futile to resort to it, that it is no help. -- Emil Cioran
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The lot of the man who has rebelled too much is to have no energy left except for disappointment. -- Emil Cioran
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Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis. -- Emil Cioran
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Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact. -- Emil Cioran
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The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion ... one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it. -- Emil Cioran
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For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one. -- Emil Cioran
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Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again. -- Emil Cioran
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No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent. -- Emil Cioran
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We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves. -- Emil Cioran
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I don't know how to make peace with things, were each moment to tear itself away from time to give me a kiss. -- Emil Cioran
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For a long time - always, in fact - I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm. -- Emil Cioran
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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such. -- Emil Cioran
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True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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I would not want to live in a world drained of all religious feeling. I am not thinking of faith but of that inner vibration, which, independent of any belief in particular, projects you into and sometimes above God. -- Emil Cioran
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The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness. -- Emil Cioran
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them. -- Emil Cioran
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We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth. -- Emil Cioran
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A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession. -- Emil Cioran
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The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. -- Emil Cioran
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It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other. -- Emil Cioran
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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history. -- Emil Cioran
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Each time I have a lapse of memory, I think of the anguish which must afflict those who know they no longer remember anything. But something tells me that after a certain time a secret joy possesses them, a joy they would not agree to trade for any of their memories, even the most stirring. ... -- Emil Cioran
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us theirs? -- Emil Cioran
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Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions. -- Emil Cioran
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Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us. -- Emil Cioran
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What a swarm of the pseudo-"delivered" stares down at us from the pinnacle of their salvation! Their conscience is clear - do they not claim to locate themselves above their actions? An intolerable swindle. -- Emil Cioran
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Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world. -- Emil Cioran
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That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope. -- Emil Cioran
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What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is. -- Emil Cioran
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it. -- Emil Cioran
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing. -- Emil Cioran
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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle. -- Emil Cioran
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I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free. -- Emil Cioran
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Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism. -- Emil Cioran
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to. -- Emil Cioran
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Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile. -- Emil Cioran
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I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction. -- Emil Cioran
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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name. -- Emil Cioran
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-To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously. -- Emil Cioran
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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh. -- Emil Cioran
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Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it. -- Emil Cioran
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The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity ... -- Emil Cioran
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There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely. -- Emil Cioran
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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. -- Emil Cioran
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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves. -- Emil Cioran
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The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy. -- Emil Cioran
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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference! -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison. -- Emil Cioran
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No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one. -- Emil Cioran
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Men follow only those who give them illusions. There have never been gatherings around a disillusioned. -- Emil Cioran
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Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator. -- Emil Cioran
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Time, fertile in resources, more inventive and more charitable than we think, possesses a remarkable capacity to help us out, to afford us at any hour of the day some new humiliation. -- Emil Cioran
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers. -- Emil Cioran
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I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad. -- Emil Cioran
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Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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The more power man acquires, the more vulnerable he becomes. What he must fear most is the moment when, creation entirely fleeced, he will celebrate his triumph, that fatal apotheosis, the victory he will not survive. -- Emil Cioran
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Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere. -- Emil Cioran
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The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief. -- Emil Cioran
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We should have abided by our larval condition, dispensed with evolution, remained incomplete, delighting in the elemental siesta and calmly consuming ourselves in an embryonic ecstasy. -- Emil Cioran
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly. -- Emil Cioran
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Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion. -- Emil Cioran
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Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past. -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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Without the idea of suicide I would have surely killed myself. -- Emil Cioran
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In a world without melancholy, nightingales would start burping -- Emil Cioran
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There is a whole range of melancholy: it begins with a smile and a landscape and ends with the clang of a broken bell in the soul -- Emil Cioran
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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. -- Emil Cioran
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It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it! -- Emil Cioran
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone. -- Emil Cioran
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It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice. -- Emil Cioran
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The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life. -- Emil Cioran
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Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered. -- Emil Cioran
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I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously? -- Emil Cioran
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Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself. -- Emil Cioran
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My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now. -- Emil Cioran
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Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are. -- Emil Cioran