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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.
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Music is the sound track of askesis. Could one make love after Bach? Not even after Handel, whose unearthliness does not have heavenly perfume. Music is a tomb of delights, beatitude which buries us.
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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
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Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.
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To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even realities; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a solitary elephant.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
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I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.
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Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.
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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
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Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.
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What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
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When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
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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