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Emil Cioran Quotes
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
Emil Cioran
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To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
Emil Cioran
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A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life
Emil Cioran
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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
Emil Cioran
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I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.
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The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.
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Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.
Emil Cioran
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
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On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."
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All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.
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The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
Emil Cioran
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We always love... despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.
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The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
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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.
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One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
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Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
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I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
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I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
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The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.
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It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
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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)
Most used words:
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day
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