What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
Emile M. CioranAnyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
Emile M. CioranIn the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
Emile M. CioranIdeas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
Emile M. CioranI have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.
Emile M. Cioran