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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Live
Believe
Signifies
Oneself
Lying
Hope

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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An existence transfigured by failure.
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Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
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It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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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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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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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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The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule he offers himself.
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To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
Emile M. Cioran
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What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!
Emile M. Cioran
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What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.
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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Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
Emile M. Cioran
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All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?
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Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!
Emile M. Cioran
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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?
Emile M. Cioran
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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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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
Emile M. Cioran
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Emile M. Cioran