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An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Individual
Risks
Toward
Taking
Instead
Risk
Takes
Within
Hurling
Dies
Refuge

More quotes by 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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.
Emile M. Cioran
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What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.
Emile M. Cioran
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
Emile M. Cioran
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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
Emile M. Cioran
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A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.
Emile M. Cioran
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
Emile M. Cioran
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Everything turns on pain the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
Emile M. Cioran
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It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
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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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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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
Emile M. Cioran
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If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: I want to be praised.
Emile M. Cioran
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
Emile M. Cioran
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Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Emile M. Cioran
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Emile M. Cioran