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Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.
Emil Cioran
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Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures — whether one is a believer or not.
Emil Cioran
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As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
Emil Cioran
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"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"
Emil Cioran
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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.
Emil Cioran
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Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what—it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?
Emil Cioran
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
Emil Cioran
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The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Emil Cioran
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We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
Emil Cioran
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Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
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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...
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We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. … And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.
Emil Cioran
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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.
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Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
Emil Cioran
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For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
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We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude...
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The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
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Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
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Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Emil Cioran
Creative Commons
Born:
April 8, 1911
Died:
June 21, 1995
(aged 84)
Bio:
Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. Cioran was born in Rășinari, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time.
Known for:
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
The Temptation to Exist (1968)
Tears and Saints (1995)
A Short History of Decay (1975)
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