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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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Emile M. Cioran
Men
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Mediocrity
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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How easy it is to be deep: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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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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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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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
Emile M. Cioran
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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
Emile M. Cioran
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
Emile M. Cioran
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Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.
Emile M. Cioran
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If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
Emile M. Cioran
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My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.
Emile M. Cioran
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
Emile M. Cioran
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Emile M. Cioran
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An existence transfigured by failure.
Emile M. Cioran
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Emile M. Cioran
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
Emile M. Cioran
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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 history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
Emile M. Cioran
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Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.
Emile M. Cioran