Emil Cioran Quotes
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego… Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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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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It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.
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On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.'
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By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let 'desire' be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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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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I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
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As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
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When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.