E. M. Cioran quote: "Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself."

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
E. M. CIORAN

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
E. M. CIORAN

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
E. M. CIORAN

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and n...
E. M. CIORAN

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people...
E. M. CIORAN

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its se...
E. M. CIORAN

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
E. M. CIORAN

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals h...
E. M. CIORAN

Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations ...
E. M. CIORAN

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
E. M. CIORAN

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. CIORAN

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
E. M. CIORAN

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
E. M. CIORAN

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
E. M. CIORAN

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaus...
E. M. CIORAN

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striv...
E. M. CIORAN

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
E. M. CIORAN

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances,...
E. M. CIORAN

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

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
E. M. CIORAN

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ours...
E. M. CIORAN

Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- ...
E. M. CIORAN

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
E. M. CIORAN

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
E. M. CIORAN

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist --a demo...
E. M. CIORAN

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
E. M. CIORAN

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are ...
E. M. CIORAN

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
E. M. CIORAN

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, th...
E. M. CIORAN

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than...
E. M. CIORAN

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
E. M. CIORAN

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
E. M. CIORAN

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
E. M. CIORAN

No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.
E. M. CIORAN

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
E. M. CIORAN

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone wo...
E. M. CIORAN

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
E. M. CIORAN

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with o...
E. M. CIORAN

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal the...
E. M. CIORAN

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encount...
E. M. CIORAN

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN

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

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
E. M. CIORAN

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As s...
E. M. CIORAN

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's eq...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
EMILE M. CIORAN

The Universal view melts things into a blur.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
EMILE M. CIORAN

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
EMILE M. CIORAN

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
EMILE M. CIORAN

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Our first intuitions are the true ones.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
EMILE M. CIORAN

We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficienc...
EMIL M. CIORAN

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I ...
EMIL M. CIORAN

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are tol...
EMIL M. CIORAN

We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
EMIL M. CIORAN

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Magnificat de Bach. Remué jusqu'aux larmes. Il est impossible que ce qui s'y exprime n'ait q...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Word - that invisible dagger.
EMILE M. CIORAN

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

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
EMILE M. CIORAN

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
EMILE M. CIORAN

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
EMIL M. CIORAN

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately consci...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
EMILE M. CIORAN

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderer...
EMILE M. CIORAN

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

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
EMIL M. CIORAN

Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor ...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
EMILE M. CIORAN

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
EMILE M. CIORAN

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
EMILE M. CIORAN

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
EMILE M. CIORAN

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not fi...
EMILE M. CIORAN

The "west" - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these...
EMILE M. CIORAN

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, prec...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
EMILE M. CIORAN

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
EMILE M. CIORAN

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
EMIL M. CIORAN

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
EMILE M. CIORAN

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
EMILE M. CIORAN

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
EMILE M. CIORAN

Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds.
EMIL M. CIORAN

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the ...
EMILE M. CIORAN

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
EMIL M. CIORAN

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first momen...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
EMIL M. CIORAN

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
EMIL M. CIORAN

Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noas...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a...
EMILE M. CIORAN

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

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
EMILE M. CIORAN

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
EMILE M. CIORAN

To be modern is to tinker with the incurable.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and inven...
EMILE M. CIORAN

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to ot...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do,...
EMILE M. CIORAN

To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do on...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massac...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
EMILE M. CIORAN

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

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
EMILE M. CIORAN

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: i...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
EMILE M. CIORAN

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and n...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ru...
EMILE M. CIORAN

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Man is unacceptable.
EMILE M. CIORAN

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged in...
EMILE M. CIORAN

In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify ...
EMILE M. CIORAN

If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be...
EMILE M. CIORAN

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
EMILE M. CIORAN

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
EMILE M. CIORAN

We inhabit a language rather than a country.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you...
EMILE M. CIORAN

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
EMILE M. CIORAN

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more effic...
EMILE M. CIORAN

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
EMILE M. CIORAN

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
EMILE M. CIORAN

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
EMILE M. CIORAN

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
EMILE M. CIORAN

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
EMILE M. CIORAN

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
EMILE M. CIORAN

The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous...
EMILE M. CIORAN

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
EMILE M. CIORAN

If you try to convert someone, it will never be to
effect his salvation but to make him suffer ...
EMIL M. CIORAN

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
EMIL M. CIORAN

It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession ...
EMIL M. CIORAN

I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Word — That invisible dagger.
EMIL M. CIORAN

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so...
EMILE M. CIORAN

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.
EMILE M. CIORAN

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by t...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Pursued by our origins... we all are.
EMILE M. CIORAN

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I a...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference an...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Les mystiques et leurs « œuvres complètes ». Quand on s'adresse à Dieu, et à Dieu seul, co...
EMIL M. CIORAN

A book is a suicide postponed.
EMIL M. CIORAN

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire w...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Dans les époques de stérilité, on devrait hiberner, dormir jour et nuit pour conserver ses forces...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
EMIL M. CIORAN

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from...
EMIL M. CIORAN

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Under each formula lies a corpse.
EMILE M. CIORAN

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: i...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow me...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
EMILE M. CIORAN

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
EMILE M. CIORAN

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, prec...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
EMILE M. CIORAN

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Niciodată nu te voi trăda de tot, deşi te-am trădat şi te voi trăda la fiecare pas; Când te-a...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Sînt unii oameni atît de prosti, ca de le-ar aparea vreo idee la suprafata creierului ea s-ar sinu...
EMIL M. CIORAN

In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legat...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
EMILE M. CIORAN

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
EMILE M. CIORAN

S'il n'avait gardé une dernière illusion, je me réclamerais volontiers d'Omar Khayyam, de ses tri...
EMIL M. CIORAN

To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without man...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, havin...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Só é saudável em nós aquilo pelo que não somos especificamente nós mesmos: são nossas aversõ...
EMIL M. CIORAN

Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, excep...
EMIL M. CIORAN

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out ... ...
EMIL M. CIORAN

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it. EMIL M. CIORAN

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist—a demo...
EMIL M. CIORAN

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

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murd...
EMILE M. CIORAN

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
EMILE M. CIORAN

Eu nu am idei ci obsesii. Idei poate avea oricine. Nimeni nu s-a prăbușit din cauza ideilor.
EMIL M. CIORAN

أشعر أنني منفصل تماما عن كل البلدان وعن كل المجموعات. أ�...
EMIL M. CIORAN

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.
EMIL M. CIORAN

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

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E. M. Cioran

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

E. M. Cioran

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