Emile M. Cioran Quotes
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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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Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.
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There was a time when time did not yet exist.
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Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
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For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.
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So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
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To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.
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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
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the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
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If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
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The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.
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The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
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To hope is to contradict the future.
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Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
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A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
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Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.
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Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
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