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Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Power
Martyred
Diminishing
Martyrdom
Martyr
Appetite
Suffering

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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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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An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
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To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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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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The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
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Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety refuge among anemic ideas.
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Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
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A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
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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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True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
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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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My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.
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Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.
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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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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.
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