Emil Cioran Quotes
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
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All morning, I did nothing but repeat: 'Man is an abyss, man is an abyss.' - I could not, alas, find anything better.
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Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
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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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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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To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.
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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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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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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
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Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
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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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Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
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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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Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
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Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
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To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.
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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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I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
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Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.