Emil Cioran

“Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.”

“We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”

“Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.”

“Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.”

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

“I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.”

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

“The Universal view melts things into a blur.”

“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.”

“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, ar...”

“The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.”

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”

“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.”

“Under each formula lies a corpse.”

“God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.”

“Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.”

“Word - that invisible dagger.”

“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.”

“The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.”

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”