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An existence transfigured by failure.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Transfigured
Failure
Existence

More quotes by 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.
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.
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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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Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
Emile M. Cioran
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The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
Emile M. Cioran
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Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
Emile M. Cioran
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Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.
Emile M. Cioran
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A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
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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Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Emile M. Cioran
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
Emile M. Cioran
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The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
Emile M. Cioran
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The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule he offers himself.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran