Emil Cioran Quotes
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The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.
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After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
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When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
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Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
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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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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.
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Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
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Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.
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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
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I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
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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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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.
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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
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Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.