Emil Cioran Quotes
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We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
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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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Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
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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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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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'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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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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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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All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.
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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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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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The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.
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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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Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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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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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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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.
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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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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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No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
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The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.