Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
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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 mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.
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Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
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If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
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The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.
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Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
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'You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again.' - 'Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?'
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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
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Tears do not burn except in solitude.
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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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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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
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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.
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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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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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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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We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.
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You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.