Emil 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.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

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

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

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

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

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.