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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Emile M. Cioran

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Emile M. Cioran
Exist
Birth
Nothing
Time
Nostalgia
Rejection

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
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Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
Emile M. Cioran
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What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
Emile M. Cioran
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If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
Emile M. Cioran
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If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: I want to be praised.
Emile M. Cioran
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True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.
Emile M. Cioran
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No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
Emile M. Cioran
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No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Emile M. Cioran
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It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
Emile M. Cioran
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Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.
Emile M. Cioran
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Man is a robot with defects.
Emile M. Cioran
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Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
Emile M. Cioran
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Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
Emile M. Cioran
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The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
Emile M. Cioran
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By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
Emile M. Cioran
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The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Emile M. Cioran