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I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Intellectual
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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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Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emile M. Cioran
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
Emile M. Cioran
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Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emile M. Cioran
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There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
Emile M. Cioran
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Normal people have nothing to forget.
Emile M. Cioran
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Emile M. Cioran
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Tolerance cannot seduce the young.
Emile M. Cioran
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The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
Emile M. Cioran
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Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.
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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Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
Emile M. Cioran
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We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job.
Emile M. Cioran
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True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
Emile M. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Under each formula lies a corpse.
Emile M. Cioran
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.
Emile M. Cioran
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A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
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