Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
— Emil Cioran
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
Word - that invisible dagger.
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
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.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
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.
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.
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.
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Under each formula lies a corpse.
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
