Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
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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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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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Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.
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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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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
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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.
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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
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The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.
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Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...
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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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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?