Best Emile M. Cioran Quotations
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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
Die
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Delight
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Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Hell
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The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or…
Case
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Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to…
Acquired
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Deficiencies
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No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.
Grief
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What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
Any
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Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity…
Contingent
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What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!
Enchanted
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The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational…
Animal
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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
Bother
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow…
Air
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If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.
Alcoholic
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What is pity but the vice of kindness.
Inspirational
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If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I…
Action
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When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you…
Appearance
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No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far…
Appetite
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Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a…
Assimilate
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I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right…
Choose
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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
Absolute
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No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life…
Alone
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The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with…
Born
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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
Believe
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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
Easy
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