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:: 1911-, Rumanian-born French Philosopher |
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Self-image]
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Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Sex]
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Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Solitude]
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Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Speech]
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It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Suicide]
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Suicide]
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Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Torture]
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
~ E. M. Cioran - [Tragedies]
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Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist --a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist --only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Pessimism]
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Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Reason]
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Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Rejection]
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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.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Salvation]
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One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Language]
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Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Martyrdom]
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No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Martyrdom]
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The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
~ E. M. Cioran - [Mind]
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