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Monday, December 30, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)


Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
Emil Cioran I agree | disagree
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
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If I were to conform to my most intimate convictions, I should cease to take any action whatever, to react in any way. But I am still capable of sensations...
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.




Cioran Emil quotes I agree | disagree
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
Cioran Emil I agree | disagree
Kill yourself because you are what you are, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!
Emil Cioran quotes I agree | disagree
There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
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As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
Cioran Emil quotes I agree | disagree
Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.
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He was above all others, and had had nothing to do with it: he had simply forgotten to desire...
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Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
Emil Cioran I agree | disagree
The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.




Emil Cioran quotes I agree | disagree
When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
Emil Cioran I agree | disagree
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
Cioran quotes I agree | disagree
If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
Cioran Emil I agree | disagree
The irritating thing about despair is its obviousness, its visibility, its "documentation": what is it but reportage? Consider hope, on the contrary - its generosity in what is false, its mania for affabulation, its rejection of the event: an aberration, a fiction. And it is in this aberration that life resides and upon this fiction that it feeds.
Cioran Emil quotes I agree | disagree
…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"
Emil Cioran quotes I agree | disagree
At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Certainty of faking from the start, at bottom. Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: "Nothing is Tragic. Everything is Unreal."
Emil Cioran I agree | disagree
Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!
Cioran Emil I agree | disagree
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.


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