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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Tragic
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Alone
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Freedom
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Cannot
Mediocre
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Paradox
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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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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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The Holy Ghost, Luther instructs us, is not a skeptic. Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.
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You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
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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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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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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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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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Wisdom disguises our wounds it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
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Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
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My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.
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To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
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There is no limit to suffering.
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An existence transfigured by failure.
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the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.
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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
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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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