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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.
Emil Cioran -
I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.
Emil Cioran
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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
Emil Cioran -
The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
Emil Cioran -
I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
Emil Cioran -
One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
Emil Cioran -
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
Emil Cioran -
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
Emil Cioran
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Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.
Emil Cioran -
Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.
Emil Cioran -
To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
Emil Cioran -
Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
Emil Cioran -
Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
Emil Cioran -
To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
Emil Cioran
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Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
Emil Cioran -
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
Emil Cioran -
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
Emil Cioran -
Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.
Emil Cioran -
The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
Emil Cioran -
Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.
Emil Cioran
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Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
Emil Cioran -
Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
Emil Cioran -
You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.
Emil Cioran -
I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
Emil Cioran