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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Emil Cioran -
The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.
Emil Cioran
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Buddhism calls anger 'corruption of the mind,' Manicheism 'root of the tree of death.' I know this, but what good does it do me to know?
Emil Cioran -
Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
Emil Cioran -
The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
Emil Cioran -
Society: an inferno of saviors!
Emil Cioran -
Creation is in fact a fault, man’s famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator’s example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.
Emil Cioran -
We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
Emil Cioran
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The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
Emil Cioran -
Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
Emil Cioran -
I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.
Emil Cioran -
Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
Emil Cioran -
Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
Emil Cioran -
Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
Emil Cioran
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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
Emil Cioran -
We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
Emil Cioran -
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
Emil Cioran -
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
Emil Cioran -
The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
Emil Cioran -
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
Emil Cioran
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A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.
Emil Cioran -
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
Emil Cioran -
To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
Emil Cioran -
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
Emil Cioran