Emil Cioran Quotes
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The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
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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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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
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What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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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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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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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.
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His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
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We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
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He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
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There is no false sensation.
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Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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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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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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Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.
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To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.