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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
Consists
Defeat
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
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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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Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
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What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
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There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Pursued by our origins... we all are.
Emile M. Cioran
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The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
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A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
Emile M. Cioran
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To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
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Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
Emile M. Cioran
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
Emile M. Cioran
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Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
Emile M. Cioran
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
Emile M. Cioran
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You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.
Emile M. Cioran
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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
Emile M. Cioran