Emil Cioran Quotes
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One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
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As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
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What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
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Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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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.
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The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.
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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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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.
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History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
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No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
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No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
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Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
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Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
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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.
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The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
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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.