Emil Cioran Quotes
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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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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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The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.
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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
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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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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
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For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.
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One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
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Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.
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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.
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'Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
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How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.
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A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.
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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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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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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
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As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
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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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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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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
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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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To think that so many have succeeded in dying!