Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.
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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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I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.
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We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...
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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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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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What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that...
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The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.
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In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.
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I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.
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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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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.
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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
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Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
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Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.
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When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.
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The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.
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One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
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Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.