Emil Cioran on Time

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

"All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments."

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

"Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion."

"We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle."

"I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction."

"What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?"

"I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them."

"To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion."

"We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to."

"A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions."

"The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer."

"We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering."

"To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally..."

"We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear."

"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."

"As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name."

"Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world."

"Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be."

"In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future."

"This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant."

"If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself."

"To act is to anchor in the imminent future."

"When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down."

"We are all secularised anarchists today."

"Awareness of time: assault on time . . ."

"When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years."

"Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent."

"Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day."

"The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up."