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What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
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No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
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The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
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The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity… Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
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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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What is pity but the vice of kindness.
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Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.
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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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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
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True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
Emile M. Cioran
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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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God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Emile M. Cioran
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We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job.
Emile M. Cioran
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One doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language.
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If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
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