Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
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We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
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They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.
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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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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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The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
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The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
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When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.
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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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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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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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How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.
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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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Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.
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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
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History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.