Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.
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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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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.
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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
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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.
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Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.
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Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.
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Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.
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By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
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Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.
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Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.
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God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
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Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
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We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.
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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?
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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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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?
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What are you waiting for in order to give up?
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To hope is to contradict the future.
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All morning, I did nothing but repeat: 'Man is an abyss, man is an abyss.' - I could not, alas, find anything better.
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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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.