Emil Cioran Quotes
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The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life
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Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!
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If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.
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What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
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What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
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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 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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Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.
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Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
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What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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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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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
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Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.
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Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?
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The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
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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.