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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Olympian
Attain
Correct
Task
Tasks
Despair
Lucidity
Ferocity

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.
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If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
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An existence transfigured by failure.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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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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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
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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.
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act. And they do calm down.
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It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
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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.
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God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
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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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If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.
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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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