Emile M. Cioran Sleep Quotations

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

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

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

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.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

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