Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the 'meaning' of life.
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Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
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I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.
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The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
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If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, 'what good did it do the occupant to be born?' I now put the same question about anyone alive.
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
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Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.
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I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.
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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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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
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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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Eternity is absence.
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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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To be is to be cornered.
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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.