Emil Cioran Quotes
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Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
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Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
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Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
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The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
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Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.
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As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.
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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
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I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.
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Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
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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.
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A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.
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Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.
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What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
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The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.