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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
Emil Cioran -
It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even 'realities'; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a 'solitary elephant.
Emil Cioran
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran -
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
Emil Cioran -
Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
Emil Cioran -
Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.
Emil Cioran -
When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
Emil Cioran
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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
Emil Cioran -
In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.
Emil Cioran -
Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
Emil Cioran -
Word - that invisible dagger.
Emil Cioran -
When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.
Emil Cioran -
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
Emil Cioran
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History proves nothing because it contains everything.
Emil Cioran -
To withstand any truth…
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran -
He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician’s invention.
Emil Cioran -
When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
Emil Cioran -
There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
Emil Cioran -
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
Emil Cioran -
Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
Emil Cioran