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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Critics
Criticism
Read
Understand
Others
Must
Misconception

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
Emile M. Cioran
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Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.
Emile M. Cioran
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Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
Emile M. Cioran
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Emile M. Cioran
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To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
Emile M. Cioran
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This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
Emile M. Cioran
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To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
Emile M. Cioran
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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 of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
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All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?
Emile M. Cioran
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True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.
Emile M. Cioran
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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emile M. Cioran
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Emile M. Cioran
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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
Emile M. Cioran
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
Emile M. Cioran
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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!
Emile M. Cioran
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
Emile M. Cioran
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How easy it is to be deep: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
Emile M. Cioran
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The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
Emile M. Cioran
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
Emile M. Cioran
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I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
Emile M. Cioran