A Short History of Decay

by Emil M. Cioran

In the fervent mind you always find the camouflaged beast of prey; no protection is adequate against the claws of a prophet. . .

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs not quite beheaded.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world. .

Against whom wage the struggle, and where lead the assault when injustice haunts the air of our lungs, the space of our thoughts, the silence and the stupor of the stars?

If, each time disappointments assail us, we had the possibility to be released from them by tears, all vague maladies and poetry itself would disappear.

We are all absurdly prudent and timid: cynicism is not something we are taught in school. Nor is pride.

(Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun. Lonelier than You, I want my hands pure, the contrary of Yours which were forever corrupted by kneading the earth and busying themselves with the world’s affairs. I ask Your stupid omnipotence for nothing but the respect of my solitude and my torments. What have I to do with Your words? And I fear the madness which would make me hear them. Grant me the miracle gathered before the first moment, the peace which You could not tolerate and which incited You to breach the nothingness in order to make way for this carnival of time, and thereby to condemn me to the universe—to humiliation and the shame of Being.)

Vainly he inspects the horizons: a thousand saviors are silhouetted there, humbug saviors, themselves unconsoled. He turns away in order to prepare himself, in his overripe soul, for the sweetness of corruption. .

We are more corrupt than all the ages, more decomposed than all the empires.

Give me another universe—or I succumb.

Daylight is hostile to thoughts, the sun blocks them out; they flourish only in the middle of the night. . .

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster: what a stupid miracle that one can live in it!

There is more than one resemblance between begging for a coin in the city and waiting for an answer from the silence of the universe.

Then I am frightened: shall I too fall so low?

Our fate being to rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is foreseen, frightful, and vain.