Emil Cioran Quotes
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The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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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.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
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Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!
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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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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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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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It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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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.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
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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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Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.