Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
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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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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
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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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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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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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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
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It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even 'realities'; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a 'solitary elephant.
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We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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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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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
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Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.