Emil Cioran Quotes
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We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude...
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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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Buddhism calls anger 'corruption of the mind,' Manicheism 'root of the tree of death.' I know this, but what good does it do me to know?
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We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
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Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
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Society: an inferno of saviors!
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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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To hope is to contradict the future.
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Existing is plagiarism.
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What are you waiting for in order to give up?
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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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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Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
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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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The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
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Word - that invisible dagger.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
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Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
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Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
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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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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
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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.