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

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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
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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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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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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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To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
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Man is a robot with defects.
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
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What is pity but the vice of kindness.
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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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.
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There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
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No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
Emile M. Cioran
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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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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.
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The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
Emile M. Cioran