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The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Vacuity
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More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
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There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
Emile M. Cioran
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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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A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
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A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
Emile M. Cioran
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When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.
Emile M. Cioran
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.
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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You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
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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The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
Emile M. Cioran
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Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
Emile M. Cioran
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If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
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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All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.
Emile M. Cioran
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The desire to die was my one and only concern to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
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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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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No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
Emile M. Cioran