Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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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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Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
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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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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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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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If to describe a misery were as easy to live through 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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Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
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What place do we occupy in the 'universe'? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.