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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Devouring
Delivered
Delight
Cannot

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.
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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 are saved, and miserable forever.
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
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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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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
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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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Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
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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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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.
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
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To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell
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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.
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If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
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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.
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I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.
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An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
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