Emil Cioran Quotes
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There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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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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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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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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I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
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Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.
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Eternity is absence.
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To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
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Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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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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To be is to be cornered.
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The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!
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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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I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
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There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
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The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
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All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.