Emil Cioran Quotes
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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.
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Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
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Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
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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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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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The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?
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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.
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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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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
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In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
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I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
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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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The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.
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I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.
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Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!