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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

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The Importance Of Insomnia

Emile M. Cioran

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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.

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Ennui Is The Echo In Us Of Time Tearing Itself Apart.

Time Is Heavy Sometimes; Imagine How Heavy Eternity Must Be.

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The Need For Novelty Is The Characteristic Of An Alienated Gorilla.

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All Philosophers Should End Their Days At Pythia's Feet. There Is Only One Philosophy, That Of Unique Moments.

We Must Suffer To The End, To The Moment When We Stop Believing In Suffering.

What Are You Waiting For In Order To Give Up?

To Think Is To Take A Cunning Revenge In Which We Camouflage Our Baseness And Conceal Our Lower Instincts.

Life Is Possible Only By The Deficiencies Of Our Imagination And Memory.

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Delirium Tremens

What Pride To Discover That Nothing Belongs To You - What A Revelation.

Humanity Adores Only Those Who Cause It To Perish.

All People See Fires, Storms, Explosions, Or Landscapes; But How Many Feel The Flames, The Lightnings, The Whirlwinds, Or The Harmony? How Many Have An Inner Beauty That Tinges Their Melancholy?

Were We To Undertake An Exhaustive Self-scrutiny, Disgust Would Paralyze Us, We Would Be Doomed To A Thankless Existence.

We Would Not Be Interested In Human Beings If We Did Not Have The Hope Of Someday Meeting Someone Worse Off Than Ourselves.

Meeting Someone

I Have Always Struggled, With The Sole Intention Of Ceasing To Struggle. Result: Zero.

We Dread The Future Only When We Are Not Sure We Can Kill Ourselves When We Want To.

I Foresee The Day When We Shall Read Nothing But Telegrams And Prayers.

A Distant Enemy Is Always Preferable To One At The Gate.

One Hardly Saves A World Without Ruling It.

Imaginary Pains Are By Far The Most Real We Suffer, Since We Feel A Constant Need For Them And Invent Them Because There Is No Way Of Doing Without Them.

To Defy Heredity Is To Defy Billions Of Years, To Defy The First Cell

By All Evidence We Are In The World To Do Nothing.

I'm Simply An Accident. Why Take It All So Seriously?

Intelligence Flourishes Only In The Ages When Belief Withers.

We Have Lost, Being Born, As Much As We Shall Lose Dying: Everything!

Boredom Dismantles The Mind, Renders It Superficial, Out At The Seams, Saps It From Within And Dislocates It.

If I Were To Be Totally Sincere, I Would Say That I Do Not Know Why I Live And Why I Do Not Stop Living. The Answer Probably Lies In The Irrational Character Of Life Which Maintains Itself Without Reason.

I Don’t Understand How People Can Believe In God, Even When I Myself Think Of Him Everyday.

I Have Tried To Protect Myself Against Men, To React Against Their Madness To Discern Its Source; I Have Listened And I Have Seen--and I Have Been Afraid Of Acting For The Same Motives Or For Any Motive Whatever, Of Believing In The Same Ghosts Or In Any Other Ghost, Of Letting Myself Be Engulfed By The Same Intoxications Or By Some Other... Afraid, In Short, Of Raving In Common And Of Expiring In A Horde Of Ecstasies.

The Limit Of Every Pain Is An Even Greater Pain.

The Only Free Mind Is One That, Pure Of All Intimacy With Beings Or Objects, Plies Its Own Vacuity.

What To Think Of Other People? I Ask Myself This Question Each Time I Make A New Acquaintance. So Strange Does It Seem To Me That We Exist, And That We Consent To Exist.

Let Us Not Be Needlessly Bitter: Certain Failures Are Sometimes Fruitful.

We Have Convictions Only If We Have Studied Nothing Thoroughly.

When Every Man Has Realized That His Birth Is A Defeat, Existence, Endurable At Last, Will Seem Like The Day After A Surrender, Like The Relief And The Repose Of The Conquered.

At This Very Moment, I Am Suffering—as We Say In French, J’ai Mal. This Event, Crucial For Me, Is Nonexistent, Even Inconceivable For Anyone Else, For Everyone Else. Except For God, If That Word Can Have A Meaning.

A Great Step Forward Was Made The Day Men Understood That In Order To Torment One Another More Efficiently They Would Have To Gather Together, To Organize Themselves Into A Society

Life Is Merely A Fracas On An Unmapped Terrain, And The Universe A Geometry Stricken With Epilepsy.

Suffering Makes You Live Time In Detail, Moment After Moment. Which Is To Say That It Exists For You: Over The Others, The Ones Who Don't Suffer, Time Flows, So That They Don't Live In Time, In Fact They Never Have.

I Try--without Success--to Stop Finding Reasons For Vanity In Anything. When I Happen To Manage It Nonetheless, I Feel That I No Longer Belong To The Mortal Gang. I Am Above Everything Then, Above The Gods Themselves. Perhaps That Is What Death Is: A Sensation Of Great, Of Extreme Superiority.

The Desire To Die Was My One And Only Concern; To It I Have Sacrificed Everything, Even Death.

My One And Only

Utopia Is The Grotesque En Rose, The Need To Associate Happiness - That Is, The Improbable - With Becoming, And To Coerce An Optimistic, Aerial Vision To The Point Where It Rejoins Its Own Source: The Very Cynicism It Sought To Combat. In Short, A Monstrous Fantasy.

Much More Than Our Other Needs And Endeavors, It Is Sexuality That Puts Us On An Even Footing With Our Kind: The More We Practice It, The More We Become Like Everyone Else: It Is In The Performance Of A Reputedly Bestial Function That We Prove Our Status As Citizens: Nothing Is More Public Than The Sexual Act.

There Is No Limit To Suffering.

Word - That Invisible Dagger.

What Can Be Said, Lacks Reality. Only What Fails To Make Its Way Into Words Exists And Counts.

My Mission Is To Kill Time, And Time's To Kill Me In Its Turn. How Comfortable One Is Among Murderers.

I Was Walking Late One Night Along A Tree-lined Path; A Chestnut Fell At My Feet. The Noise It Made As It Burst, The Resonance It Provoked In Me, And An Upheaval Out Of All Proportion To This Insignificant Event Thrust Me Into Miracle, Into The Rapture Of The Definitive, As If There Were No More Questions-only Answers. I Was Drunk On A Thousand Unexpected Discoveries, None Of Which I Could Make Use Of. ... This Is How I Nearly Reached The Supreme. But Instead I Went On With My Walk.

Shame On The Man Who Goes To His Grave Escorted By The Miserable Hopes That Have Kept Him Alive.

The Deepest And Most Organic Death Is Death In Solitude, When Even Light Becomes A Principle Of Death. In Such Moments You Will Be Severed From Life, From Love, Smiles, Friends And Even From Death. And You Will Ask Yourself If There Is Anything Besides The Nothingness Of The World And Your Own Nothingness.

We Cannot Be Normal And Alive At The Same Time.

Transmitting One's Flaws [through Procreation] To Someone Else Is A Crime. I Could Never Consent To Give Life To Someone Who Would Inherent My Ailments.

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