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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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Emile M. Cioran
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
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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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Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
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My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
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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.
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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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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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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
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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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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?
Emile M. Cioran
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All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.
Emile M. Cioran
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
Emile M. Cioran
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Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
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What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.
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I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.
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The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
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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