63 Quotes by Emil M. Cioran about pessimism
- Author Emil M. Cioran
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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
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- Author Emil M. Cioran
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If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?
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When we think of the Berlin salons in the Romantic period, of the role played in them by a Henrietta Herz or a Rachel Levin, of the friendship between the latter and Crown Prince Louis-Ferdinand; and when we then think that if such women had lived in this century they would have died in some gas chamber, we cannot help considering the belief in progress as the falsest and stupidest of superstitions.
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- Author Emil M. Cioran
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We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.
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No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.
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And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.
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Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
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If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of 'problems', it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.
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We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...
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