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Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.
Emil Cioran -
Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
Emil Cioran
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'What is truth?' is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to 'How to endure life?' And even this one pales beside the next: 'How to endure oneself?' - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.
Emil Cioran -
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
Emil Cioran -
A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
Emil Cioran -
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
Emil Cioran -
The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
Emil Cioran -
Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!
Emil Cioran
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
Emil Cioran -
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
Emil Cioran -
If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?
Emil Cioran -
…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
Emil Cioran -
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
Emil Cioran -
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
Emil Cioran
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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?
Emil Cioran -
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran -
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...
Emil Cioran -
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Emil Cioran -
One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
Emil Cioran
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By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let 'desire' be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.
Emil Cioran -
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
Emil Cioran -
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.
Emil Cioran -
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
Emil Cioran