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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.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
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True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
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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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Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
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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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Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
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Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
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Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
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