Emil Cioran Quotes
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Eternity is absence.
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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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What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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To be is to be cornered.
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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
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Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
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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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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.
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I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.
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I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
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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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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
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The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.
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Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.
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It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.
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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
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If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.
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To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.
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Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.
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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.