Emile M. Cioran Night Quotations

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.

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.

What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!

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.

Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.