Emil Cioran Quotes
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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.
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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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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 to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.
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We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
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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.
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Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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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.
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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
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What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.
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Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
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Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
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To suffer is to produce knowledge.
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If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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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.
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There is no false sensation.
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For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
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I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.