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Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Precisely
Secrets
Proportion
Secret
Subverts
Knowledge
Misanthropy
Come
Resemble
Kind
Loathe
Love
Penetrate

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.
Emile M. Cioran
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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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No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
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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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Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
Emile M. Cioran
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Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
Emile M. Cioran
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Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
Emile M. Cioran
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
Emile M. Cioran
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The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
Emile M. Cioran
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Wisdom disguises our wounds it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
Emile M. Cioran
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It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Emile M. Cioran
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Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
Emile M. Cioran
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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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Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
Emile M. Cioran
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Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.
Emile M. Cioran
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Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.
Emile M. Cioran
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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
Emile M. Cioran
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Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
Emile M. Cioran
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The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
Emile M. Cioran
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To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
Emile M. Cioran