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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
Emil Cioran -
All morning, I did nothing but repeat: 'Man is an abyss, man is an abyss.' - I could not, alas, find anything better.
Emil Cioran
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
Emil Cioran -
To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.
Emil Cioran -
Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
Emil Cioran -
To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.
Emil Cioran -
Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
Emil Cioran -
Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.
Emil Cioran
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I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran -
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
Emil Cioran -
Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran
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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.
Emil Cioran -
How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.
Emil Cioran -
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Emil Cioran -
Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
Emil Cioran -
Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.
Emil Cioran -
No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
Emil Cioran
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I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
Emil Cioran -
I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.
Emil Cioran -
Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.
Emil Cioran -
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
Emil Cioran