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There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
Emil Cioran -
Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
Emil Cioran
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
Emil Cioran -
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
Emil Cioran -
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
Emil Cioran -
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
Emil Cioran -
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
Emil Cioran -
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
Emil Cioran
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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
Emil Cioran -
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
Emil Cioran -
Tears do not burn except in solitude.
Emil Cioran -
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false.
Emil Cioran -
Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
Emil Cioran -
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
Emil Cioran
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Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
Emil Cioran -
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
Emil Cioran -
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
Emil Cioran -
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Emil Cioran -
No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
Emil Cioran -
There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
Emil Cioran
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To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
Emil Cioran -
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
Emil Cioran -
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emil Cioran -
Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.
Emil Cioran