Emile M. Cioran

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

An existence transfigured by failure.

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job.

We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.