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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.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
World
Diversity
Contingent
Leaving
Obsessions
Private
Multiplicity
Except
Insomnia
Darkness
Prey
Particular
Kills
Light
Ecstasy
Nothing
Obsession
Purifies

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
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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.
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Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
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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.
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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.
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What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
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At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
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The desire to die was my one and only concern to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
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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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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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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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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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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Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
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Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
Emile M. Cioran
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Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.
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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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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
Emile M. Cioran
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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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