26 quotes by Emil Cioran

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A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Religion

3.0 · 39 votes

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A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

Disease

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A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Conversation

3.7 · 34 votes · 160 reads

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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.

Solitude

3.6 · 61 votes · 191 reads

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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Consciousness

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Art and Culture
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
4.4 · 38 votes · 9 reads
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Feelings
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
4.5 · 30 votes · 18 reads
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Society
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
4.4 · 18 votes · 14 reads
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Thought and Reason
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
4.4 · 10 votes · 190 reads
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Nature
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
4.6 · 5 votes · 105 reads
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Art and Culture
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
3.6 · 51 votes · 110 reads
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Various
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland -and no other.
3.7 · 39 votes · 96 reads
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Defects
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.
3.3 · 57 votes · 161 reads
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Thought and Reason
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
4.1 · 42 votes · 65 reads
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Thought and Reason
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
3.1 · 11 votes · 167 reads
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Various
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
5.0 · 43 votes · 3 reads
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Thought and Reason
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
4.4 · 19 votes · 35 reads
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Defects
The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.
3.3 · 39 votes · 8 reads
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Various
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
3.1 · 56 votes · 18 reads
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Defects
Those who believe in their truth - the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men - leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom huma
3.8 · 58 votes · 89 reads
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Various
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
3.2 · 48 votes · 92 reads
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Various
To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
3.9 · 22 votes · 112 reads
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Society
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
3.1 · 15 votes · 179 reads
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Feelings
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.
4.2 · 34 votes · 29 reads
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Virtues
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
4.8 · 36 votes · 72 reads
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Society
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?
4.7 · 46 votes · 125 reads
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