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Emil Cioran -
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
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"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."
Emil Cioran
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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.
Emil Cioran
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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.
Emil Cioran
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Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas.
Emil Cioran
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I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
Emil Cioran
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Vengeance is a need, the most intense and profound of all, and…each man must satisfy it, if only in words. If we stifle that need, we expose ourselves to certain disturbances. More than one disorder—perhaps all disorders—derive from a vengeance too long postponed.
Emil Cioran
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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
Emil Cioran
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The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
Emil Cioran
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Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
Emil Cioran
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If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.
Emil Cioran
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
Emil Cioran
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The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
Emil Cioran
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"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...
Emil Cioran
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Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert.
Emil Cioran
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At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
Emil Cioran
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I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.
Emil Cioran
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To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell
Emil Cioran
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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
Emil Cioran
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
Emil Cioran
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What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.
Emil Cioran
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Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
Emil Cioran
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Emil Cioran
Creative Commons
Born:
April 8, 1911
Died:
June 21, 1995
(aged 84)
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