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A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Life
Decline
Sole
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I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
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Time is heavy sometimes imagine how heavy eternity must be.
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the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.
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To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
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Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
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What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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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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Tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
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The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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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.
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Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
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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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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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Word - that invisible dagger.
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As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
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If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
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Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
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Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
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