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Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
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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To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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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?
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Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!
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Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
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When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
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The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.
Emil Cioran
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His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
Emil Cioran
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
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One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.
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They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.
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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.
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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Nothing is a 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.
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The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.
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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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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
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For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.
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Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.
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Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.
Emil Cioran
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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
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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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