Emil Cioran Quotes
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There is no false sensation.
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He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
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Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
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To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
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What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
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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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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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If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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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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I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.
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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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What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
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To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...
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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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Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?
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Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
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So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.