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Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Elegance
Skepticism
Anxiety

More quotes by 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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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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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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We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.
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?
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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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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Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.
Emile M. Cioran
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Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
Emile M. Cioran
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No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
Emile M. Cioran
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
Emile M. Cioran
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God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
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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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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The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
Emile M. Cioran
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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.
Emile M. Cioran
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
Emile M. Cioran
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Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
Emile M. Cioran
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Emile M. Cioran
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
Emile M. Cioran