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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Kind
Undertaking
Undertakings
Insignificant
Venture
Envy
Sacrifice
Upon
Even

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!
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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
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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.
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
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Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
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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?
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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.
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If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
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You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
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Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.
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The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
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I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.
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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.
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Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
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To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
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