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Emil Cioran -
A Short History of Decay (1975)
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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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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
Emil Cioran
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Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
Emil Cioran
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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
Emil Cioran
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Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.
Emil Cioran
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Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
Emil Cioran
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The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.
Emil Cioran
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At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.
Emil Cioran
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Emil Cioran
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I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.
Emil Cioran
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I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.
Emil Cioran
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To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.
Emil Cioran
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We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
Emil Cioran
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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Emil Cioran
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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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So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.
Emil Cioran
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No one has the audacity to exclaim: I don't want to do anything! —we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.
Emil Cioran
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Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
Emil Cioran
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Emil Cioran
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police — and end by calling them in.
Emil Cioran
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Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.
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Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
Emil Cioran
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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
Emil Cioran
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Quote of the day
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
Susan Sontag
Emil Cioran
Creative Commons
Born:
April 8, 1911
Died:
June 21, 1995
(aged 84)
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