Emil Cioran Quotes
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What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
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Existing is plagiarism.
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Society: an inferno of saviors!
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.
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If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
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To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.
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At this very moment, I am suffering-as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
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Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
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The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
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The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.
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I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
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Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...
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Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
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In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.
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Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.
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Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
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I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
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Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
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Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
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As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.