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Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.
Emil Cioran -
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
Emil Cioran
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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
Emil Cioran -
Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
Emil Cioran -
You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!
Emil Cioran -
'Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
Emil Cioran -
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
Emil Cioran -
This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
Emil Cioran
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When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
Emil Cioran -
Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran -
In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
Emil Cioran -
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
Emil Cioran -
To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
Emil Cioran
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
Emil Cioran -
To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
Emil Cioran -
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
Emil Cioran -
Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Emil Cioran -
Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.
Emil Cioran -
Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.
Emil Cioran
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
Emil Cioran -
In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
Emil Cioran -
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
Emil Cioran -
An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
Emil Cioran