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.

Emile M. Cioran

Categorized in : Animal Sleep Insomnia

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

Emile M. Cioran

evidence world

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

Emile M. Cioran

next way ideas

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

Emile M. Cioran

suicidal suicide too-late

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

Emile M. Cioran

real fall thinking

The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.

Emile M. Cioran

knowing love art

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Emile M. Cioran

protest hell demand

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

Emile M. Cioran

endure morning night

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

Emile M. Cioran

sole solitude mean

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

Emile M. Cioran

vomiting wish sometimes

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

Emile M. Cioran

insects tragedy would-be

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

Emile M. Cioran

cancer tree men

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

Emile M. Cioran

succeed suicide reason

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

Emile M. Cioran

true-ones intuition firsts

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

Emile M. Cioran

groups feels country

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

Emile M. Cioran

chaos-in-the-world chaos being-yourself

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

Emile M. Cioran

philosophical girl fighting

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

Emile M. Cioran

acrimony caprice devil

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.

Emile M. Cioran

regret men world

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

Emile M. Cioran

flow dust would-be

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

Emile M. Cioran

twenties long years