Emil M. Cioran (April 8, 1911 – June 20, 1995) was a Romanian-born writer known for his essays on philosophy and culture and his emphasis on despair, emptiness and death. This guy makes Marvin the Paranoid Android seem like Pharrell Williams. (Click here for his obituary in the New York Times.)
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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
Beware of euphemisms! They aggravate the horror they are supposed to disguise.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.
For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
I am displeased with everything. If they made me God, I would immediately resign.
I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is God.
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
Nothing is worse than the coarseness and meanness we perpetrate out of timidity.
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner.
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
To hope is to contradict the future.
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
Categories: Emil Cioran, Quotes of the day
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