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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The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
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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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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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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
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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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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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Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.
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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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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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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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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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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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Buddhism calls anger 'corruption of the mind,' Manicheism 'root of the tree of death.' I know this, but what good does it do me to know?
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.