Emil Cioran Quotes

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To grant life more importance than it has is the mistake committed in sagging systems; as a consequence, no one is ready to sacrifice himself to defend them, and they collapse under the first blows perpetrated upon them. This is even more true of nations in general. Once they begin to hold life sacred, it abandons them, it ceases to be on their side. ~ Emil Cioran
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Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? ~ Emil Cioran
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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down. ~ Emil Cioran
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I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir. ~ Dylan Moran
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Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis. ~ Emil Cioran
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The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion ... one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it. ~ Emil Cioran
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Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again. ~ Emil Cioran
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If we understand many more things than other people, we owe it to our nervous system which is far more disturbed. One says 'I'm sad' but no one realizes what is the cause of his/her sadness; it may come from the stomach; or from a tune we have just listened to and which failed to impress us on the spot; or it may come from frustrated sexual desire ... It is not easy to see beyond symbolic forms of expression. People don't realize that you can negate the progress of humanity because your feet hurt. It is important to see beyond that which is given; and yet, once you see it, nothing matters. ~ Emil Cioran
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I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen
and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other ... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies. ~ 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
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I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions - only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. ...
This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk. ~ Emil Cioran
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Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen. ~ Emil Cioran
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility. ~ Emil Cioran
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We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon-this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing. ~ Emil Cioran
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We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job ... ~ Emil Cioran
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To what temptations, to what extremities does lucidity lead! Shall we desert it now to take refuge in unconsciousness? Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet's equal there. But our perspicacity cannot bear that such a marvel should endure, nor that inspiration should be brought within everyone's grasp; daylight strips us of the night's gifts. Only the madman enjoys the privilege of passing smoothly from a nocturnal to a daylight existence: no distinction between his dreams and his waking. He has renounced our reason, as the beggar has renounced our belongings. Both have found a way that leads beyond suffering and solved all our problems; hence they remain examples we cannot follow, saviors without adepts. ~ Emil Cioran
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It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice. ~ Emil Cioran
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The dead center of existence: when it is all the same to you whether you read a newspaper article or think about God. ~ Emil Cioran
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Impartiality is incompatible with the will to affirm oneself or quite simply with the will to exist. To acknowledge another's merits is an alarming symptom, an act against nature. ~ Emil Cioran
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I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world. ~ Emil Cioran
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Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions. ~ Emil Cioran
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After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep's labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets. ~ Emil Cioran
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Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. ~ Emil Cioran
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Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it. ~ Emil Cioran
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To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known. ~ Emil Cioran
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We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy' ... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone. ~ Emil Cioran
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Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy. ~ Emil Cioran
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For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one. ~ Emil Cioran
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The more power man acquires, the more vulnerable he becomes. What he must fear most is the moment when, creation entirely fleeced, he will celebrate his triumph, that fatal apotheosis, the victory he will not survive. ~ Emil Cioran
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We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy. ~ Emil Cioran
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If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy an even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it - so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse. ~ Emil Cioran
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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. ~ Emil Cioran
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Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere. ~ Emil Cioran
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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. ~ Emil Cioran
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I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free. ~ Emil Cioran
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Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing. ~ Emil Cioran
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We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tete-a-tete with what is left of ourselves. ~ Emil Cioran
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My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh. ~ Emil Cioran
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For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened. ...
No sooner are they open than the drama beings. To look without understanding - that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much. ... ~ Emil Cioran
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Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself. ~ Emil Cioran
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Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. ( ... ) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse. ~ Emil Cioran
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His sterility was infinite: it partook of ecstasy. ~ Emil Cioran
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. ~ Emil Cioran
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Nothing desiccates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas. ~ Emil Cioran
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death? ~ Emil Cioran
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Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man, said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world's unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything. ~ Emil Cioran
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I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside. ~ Emil Cioran
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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
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Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.
Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy. ~ Emil Cioran
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend. ~ Emil Cioran
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We begin to live authentically only where philosophy ends, at its wreck, when we have understood its terrible nullity, when we have understood that it was futile to resort to it, that it is no help. ~ Emil Cioran
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Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far ~ Emil Cioran
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If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason. ~ Emil Cioran
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Nothing is better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations. ~ Emil Cioran
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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name. ~ Emil Cioran
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice. ~ Emil Cioran
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Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator. ~ Emil Cioran
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I would not want to live in a world drained of all religious feeling. I am not thinking of faith but of that inner vibration, which, independent of any belief in particular, projects you into and sometimes above God. ~ Emil Cioran
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Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you. ~ Emil Cioran
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We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonic verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes. ( ... )
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity. ~ Emil Cioran
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Some of Mozart's Andantes emanate an ethereal desolation, a sort of dream funeral in another life. ~ Emil Cioran
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A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people. ~ Emil Cioran
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything! ~ Emil Cioran
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What a swarm of the pseudo-"delivered" stares down at us from the pinnacle of their salvation! Their conscience is clear - do they not claim to locate themselves above their actions? An intolerable swindle. ~ Emil Cioran
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One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world. ~ Emil Cioran
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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. ~ Emil Cioran
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The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity ... ~ Emil Cioran
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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. ~ Emil Cioran
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To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse - to behave with them like an undertaker. ~ Emil Cioran
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us theirs? ~ Emil Cioran
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The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion. ~ Emil Cioran
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What misery a sensation is! Ecstasy itself, perhaps, is nothing more. ~ Emil Cioran
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While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. "What will be the use of that?" he was asked. "To know this tune before dying." If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence. ~ Emil Cioran
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That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope. ~ Emil Cioran
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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece. ~ Emil Cioran
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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. ~ Emil Cioran
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It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it! ~ Emil Cioran
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The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. ~ Emil Cioran
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The mystics and their "collected works." When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn't read ... ~ Emil Cioran
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Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy! ~ Emil Cioran
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But how can those who violently experience hatred, despair, chaos,
nothingness, or love, who burn with each passion and gradually die with each and in each, those who can only breathe on heights, who are always alone, especially when they are with others - how can they grow in linear fashion and crystallize into a system? ~ Emil Cioran
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The "west"-what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles ... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end? ~ Emil Cioran
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Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them. ~ Emil Cioran
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We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle. ~ Emil Cioran
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It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us. ~ Emil Cioran
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At best, we conceive happiness; never felicity, prerogative of civilizations based on the idea of salvation, on the refusal to savor one's sufferings, to revel in them; but, sybarites of suffering, scions of a masochistic tradition, which of us would hesitate between the Benares sermon and Baudelaire's Heautontimoroumenos? I am both wound and knife - that is our absolute, our eternity. ~ Emil Cioran
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Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds. ~ Emil Cioran
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I feel I must burst because of all that life offers me and because of the prospect of death. I feel that I am dying of solitude, of love, of despair, of hatred, of all that this world offers me. With every experience I expand like a balloon blown up beyond its capacity. The most terrifying intensification bursts into nothingness. You
grow inside, you dilate madly until there are no boundaries left, you reach the edge of light, where light is stolen by night, and from that plenitude as in a savage whirlwind you are thrown straight into nothingness. Life breeds both plenitude and void, exuberance and depression. What are we when confronted with the interior vortex which swallows us into absurdity? I feel my life cracking within me from too much intensity, too much disequilibrium. It is like an explosion which cannot be contained, which throws you up in the air along with everything else ~ Emil Cioran
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Here are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Once you have reached the limits of life, having lived to extremity all that is offered at those dangerous borders, the everyday gesture and the usual aspiration lose their seductive charm. If you go on living, you do so only through your capacity for objectification, your ability to free yourself, in writing, from the infinite strain. Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death ~ Emil Cioran
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If there was a common, even official form of killing oneself, suicide would be much easier and much more frequent. But since to be done with it all we must find our own way, we waste so much time meditating on trifles that we forget what is essential. ~ Emil Cioran
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I wonder through the days like a whore in a world with no sidewalks. ~ Emil Cioran
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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing. ~ Emil Cioran
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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
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Memories vanish when we want to remember, but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget. ~ Emil Cioran
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If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable. ~ Emil Cioran
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The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is. ~ Emil Cioran
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows. ~ Emil Cioran
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At the climax of failure, at the moment when shame is about to do us in, suddenly we are swept away by a frenzy of pride which lasts only long enough to drain us, to leave us without energy, to lower, with our powers, the intensity of our shame. ~ Emil Cioran
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To see things as they really are renders life almost completely intolerable. Myself because I have, I believe, at least in part, seen things as they really are, I could never act. I have always remained on the fringe of actions. So, is it desirable that people come to see things as they really are? I don't know. I believe that, in general, people are incapable of it. So therefore it is true that only a monster can see things as they really are, because the monster lies outside of humanity. ~ Emil Cioran
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We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication. ~ Emil Cioran
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