Emil Cioran Quotes
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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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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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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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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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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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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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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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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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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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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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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
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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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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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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
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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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Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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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.