Time & Perspective Quote by Emile M. Cioran

Cioran turns the most ordinary human project into a noir comedy: we “kill time” with distractions, schedules, entertainment, little errands that make the day feel managed. Then he flips it with a grim symmetry - time kills us back. The line works because it refuses the comforting asymmetry we usually grant ourselves. We act as if boredom is the enemy and time is just raw material; Cioran insists the relationship is reciprocal, and we are not the dominant party.

“My mission” is the tell. It’s mock-heroic language applied to the least heroic endeavor, exposing how modern life moralizes busyness. Killing time becomes a vocation, a self-justifying identity. That’s the subtext: we don’t merely pass hours; we build elaborate alibis against mortality. The phrase “in its turn” adds the cold procedural tone of an execution schedule. Death isn’t melodrama here; it’s bureaucracy.

The sting is in the last sentence. “How comfortable one is among murderers” makes accomplices of everyone. Time is the obvious murderer, but so are we, casually, daily, by consenting to the slow violence of postponement and sedation. Comfort, in Cioran’s hands, is not relief; it’s moral numbness. The line lands with that signature Cioranian blend of aphoristic elegance and corrosive intimacy: he’s not announcing a tragic worldview from a mountaintop, he’s describing the cozy room where we already live - furnished with habits, lit by screens, and ticking.