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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
Nostalgia
Rejection
Exist
Birth
Nothing
Time

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
Emile M. Cioran
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Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.
Emile M. Cioran
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The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
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Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
Emile M. Cioran
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
Emile M. Cioran
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
Emile M. Cioran
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Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
Emile M. Cioran
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Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
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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Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Emile M. Cioran
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What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
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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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Emile M. Cioran
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We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job.
Emile M. Cioran
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Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
Emile M. Cioran
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We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
Emile M. Cioran
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Emile M. Cioran
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Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.
Emile M. Cioran
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Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
Emile M. Cioran