Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
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If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?
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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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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, 'What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.' And they do calm down.
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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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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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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
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The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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If someone incessantly drops the word 'life,' you know he's a sick man.
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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them...The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.
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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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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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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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Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.
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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.