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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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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.
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To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
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There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
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My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
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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Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
Emile M. Cioran
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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: I want to be praised.
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Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
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Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
Emile M. Cioran
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Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
Emile M. Cioran
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
Emile M. Cioran
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the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.
Emile M. Cioran
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A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
Emile M. Cioran
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Word - that invisible dagger.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
Emile M. Cioran
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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
Emile M. Cioran