504 Quotes by Emil Cioran

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

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it --we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind.

When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.

True knowledge comes down to vigils in the darkness: the sum of our insomnias alone distinguishes us from the animals and from our kind. What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper?

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal that 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.

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable.