Emile M. Cioran

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

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.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."

It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

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.