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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Preferable
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.
Emile M. Cioran
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One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
Emile M. Cioran
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The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
Emile M. Cioran
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I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.
Emile M. Cioran
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Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
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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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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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Emile M. Cioran
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What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
Emile M. Cioran
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
Emile M. Cioran
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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
Emile M. Cioran
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There is no limit to suffering.
Emile M. 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.
Emile M. Cioran
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All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.
Emile M. Cioran
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
Emile M. Cioran
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Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.
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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If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
Emile M. Cioran
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Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
Emile M. Cioran