Emil Cioran Quotes
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After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
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We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
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Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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Transmitting one's flaws through procreation to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.
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Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.
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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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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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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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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.
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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?
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You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.
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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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Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
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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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Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
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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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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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Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.