A Short History of Decay Quotes

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.

Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.”
― emil cioran, A Short History of Decay

“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.”
― E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“إذا كانت الحياة تحتل المركز الأول في سُلم الأكاذيب, فالحب يأتي بعدها مُباشرة.كذبة داخل كذبة هي التعبير عن موقفنا الهجين,الحب محاط بادوات غبطى وتعذيب تعود إلى ما نجده في أحدهم كبديل لأنفسنا . لكن يالها من خدعة تُحول عيوننا بعيداً عن العزلة!, هل هناك أي خيبة أكثر إذلالاً للعقل؟ الحب مُسكن مؤقت للمعرفة;اليقظة والمعرفة تفتل الحب. اللاواقعية لايمكنها أن تنتصر إلى أجل غير مُسمى,حتى بتقنيع المظاهر لأكبر كذبة تمجيداً. علاوة على ذلك من الذي لديه أوهام صلبة بما يكفي ليرى في الأخر ما لم يراه عبثاً في نفسه؟ أيمكن أن نجد في تنور من الأحشاء ما لم نجده في الكون؟”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Once I had a “self”; now I am no more than an object.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep’s labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“In the verbal conflagration of a Shakespeare and a Shelley we smell the ash of words, backwash and effluvium of an impossible cosmogony. The terms encroach upon each other, as though none could attain the equivalent of the inner dilation; this is the hernia of the image, the transcendent rupture of poor words, born of everyday use and miraculously raised to the heart’s altitudes. The truths of beauty are fed on exaggerations which, upon the merest analysis, turn out to be monstrous and meaningless. Poetry: demiurgical divagation of the vocabulary. . . . Has charlatanism ever been more effectively combined with ecstasy? Lying, the wellspring of all tears! such is the imposture of genius and the secret of art. Trifles swollen to the heavens; the improbable, generator of a universe! In every genius coexists a braggart and a god.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch-—and watch themselves watching. Sloth is a somatic skepticism, the way the flesh doubts. In a world of inaction, the idle would be the only ones not to be murderers. But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain—spectators of the human convulsion—the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. What would they have to fear from a limitless extension of certain afternoons except the regret of having supported a crudely elementary obviousness? Then, exasperation in the truth might induce them to imitate the others and to indulge in the degrading temptation of tasks. This is the danger which threatens sloth, that miraculous residue of paradise.”
― E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let “desire” be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“لكي يجد المرء نفسه، لاشيء أفضل له من أن يُنسَى وأن لا يأتي أحدهم ليتدخل بينه وبين ما هو مهم. كلما انصرف الآخرون عنا ازداد عملهم من أجل كمالنا: إنهم ينقذوننا من خلال هجرنا”
― Emil Cioran, لو كان آدم سعيدًا

“His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses?”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“لا وجود لحرية ولا حياة حقيقة من دون التمرن على التخلص من الملكية”
― Emil Cioran, لو كان آدم سعيدًا

“المرض منفذ لا إرادي إلى ذواتنا يجبرنا على التوغل في العمق ويحكمنا به والمريض .. إنه ميتافيزيقي رغم أنفه”
― Emil Cioran, لو كان آدم سعيدًا

“Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“umiremo srazmerno broju rechi koje razbacujemo svuda oko sebe.oni koji govore nemaju tajni. a svi govorimo. izdajemo se, krchmimo dushu; svako se, kao dzhelat neizrecivog, upinje da unishti sve tajne, pochev od sopstvenih.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“güzellik, tomurcukların içinde şişinen ölümden başka bir şey değildir”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Viaţa în comun devine intolerabilă, iar viaţa de unul singur, şi mai de nesu portat.”
― Emil Cioran, Tratat de descompunere

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ترياق السأم هو الخوف. ينبغي أن يكون الدواء أقوى من الداء.”
― Emil Cioran, لو كان آدم سعيدًا

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استيقظت مندفعًا من النوم بسبب هذا التساؤل: "إلى أين تذهب هذه اللحظة؟" وكان جوابي: "إلى الموت" وسرعان ما عدت إلى النوم.

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― Emil Cioran, لو كان آدم سعيدًا