Emil Cioran Quotes
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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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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All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
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No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
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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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I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
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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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Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.
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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.
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If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."
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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.
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Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be...optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?
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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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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
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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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What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
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There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
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He who hates himself is not humble.
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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No one has the audacity to exclaim: 'I don’t want to do anything!' -we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.