Emil Cioran Quotes
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One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
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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 dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
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Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.
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Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
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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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History proves nothing because it contains everything.
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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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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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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
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To think that so many have succeeded in dying!
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It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
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If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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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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Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.