Emil Cioran Quotes
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We are all secularised anarchists today.
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Two enemies - the same man divided.
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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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The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
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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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Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
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It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?
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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the 'meaning' of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.
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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
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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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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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Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
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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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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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Read day and night, devour books-these sleeping pills-not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
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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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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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'I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.' This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.
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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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What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
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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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The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the 'meaning' of life.