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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Possess
Illusion
Merely
Longer
Freedom
Everything

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Pursued by our origins... we all are.
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The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
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I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
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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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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
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Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
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We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.
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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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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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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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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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By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
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The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
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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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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 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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