Emil Cioran Quotes
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To fear is to die every minute.
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The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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Word - that invisible dagger.
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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
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If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.
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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
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To think that so many have succeeded in dying!
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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.
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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.
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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
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To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
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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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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.