Emil Cioran Quotes
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Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.
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To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.
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Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
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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.
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Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.
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Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
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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.
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What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.
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Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…
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I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.
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Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
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That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…
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We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.
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Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.
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No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
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My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
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Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.
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Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.
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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.
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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.
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To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
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To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.
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Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.
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History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.