Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.
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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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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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In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
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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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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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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
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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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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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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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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
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I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
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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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As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
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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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I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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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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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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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.