Emil Cioran Quotes

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

I agree with what Mark Twain said - we're all mad at night.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

I do have some very strange thoughts... Still, all geniuses are mad aren't they?

I could write songs on the beach, but the interior darkness, we have it all. We have it.

It's true we're all a little insane.

Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

There is a pleasure in being mad which none but madmen know.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?

We all go a little mad sometimes.

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

The man who never dreams, goes slowly mad.

I think that I'm so psychotic and so mentally ill that if I could tap into that I could do something really interesting.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

If you have an impulse, not if you're going to ruin someone elses' scene, if you have an impulse of a funny little add-on or taking something in a weird direction, try it.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.