Emil Cioran Quotes
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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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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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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
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Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.
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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
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The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.
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We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
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Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
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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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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
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Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
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What place do we occupy in the 'universe'? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
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He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
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The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
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Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
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So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.