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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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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
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It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false
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By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
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The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
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All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?
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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language.
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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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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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
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The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.
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The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
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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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Tolerance cannot seduce the young.
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What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.
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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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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
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