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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
Despair
Lucidity
Ferocity
Olympian
Attain
Correct
Task
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
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On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.
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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 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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Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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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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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.
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There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
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Transmitting one's flaws [through procreation] to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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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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As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
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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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At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
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Pursued by our origins... we all are.
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