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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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Emile M. Cioran
Elegance
Consists
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
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Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
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An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
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A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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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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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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All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
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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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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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I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.
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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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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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No one can do without some semblance of immortality, and even less will they deny themselves the right to seek it out in the form of this or that reputation, starting with the literary... Since death has come to be accepted by all as the absolute end, everyone writes.
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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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You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
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Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
Emile M. Cioran
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Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
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Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
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