But we cannot address our prayers to him: to worship him would be to pray irrespectively, to pray to ourselves. Detached from every object, having nothing external to assimilate, we destroy ourselves in slow motion, since the future has stopped offering us a raison d'être. But the Devil never complains and never aspires to found a religion: are we not here to safeguard him from inanition and oblivion? When a nation no longer has any prejudice in its blood, its sole resource remains its will to disintegrate.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. To be fooled, to live and die duped, is certainly what men do But there exists a dignity which keeps us from disappearing into God and which transforms all our moments into prayers we shall never offer. This would not be an issue if a book is simply written, but I would say that this book is not as straightforward as the absence of an introduction implies. a] Throughout the text, Cioran entertains several of the negative themes which permeate his work, in poetic language. Health preserves life as such, in a sterile identity; while disease is an activity, the most intense a man can indulge in, a frenetic and .A little too repetitive for my liking, which gives rise to the feeling Cioran might have been too fond of the sound of his own voice, and of the verbal pyrotechnics for which he was to become famous. Any sincere philosophy renounces the claims of civilization, whose function consists in sifting our secrets and disguising them as recherché effects. Touching upon man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable.

Life is only that impatience to fall, to fail, to prostitute the soul’s virginal solitudes by dialogue, ageless and everyday negation of Paradise.Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine: “mission” smothers music, idea shackles inspiration. To the outside observer, the absolute of each life looks interchangeable, and every fate, however fixed in its essence, arbitrary.

For the outburst of desires, amid our knowledge which contradicts them, creates a dreadful conflict between our mind opposing the Creation and the irrational substratum which binds us to it still. But we could not exist one second without deceiving ourselves: the prophet in each of us is just the seed of madness which makes us flourish in our void.It can no longer hear at close range the hum of humanity; it wants to consider from as far away as possible the accursed symmetry which links men together.

To be the dissolvent of a philosophy or of an empire: what pride could be more melancholy and more majestic? stationary movement, the richest expenditure of energy without gesture, the hostile and impassioned expectation of an irreparable lightning bolt. The arguments come later; the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of ‘wisdom’. Illuminating and brutally honest, A Short History of Decay dissects Man's decadence in a remarkable series of moving and beautiful pieces. Love’s one function is to help us endure those cruel and incommensurable Sunday afternoons which torment us for the rest of the week—and for eternity.Used books have different signs of use and might not include supplemental materials such as CDs, Dvds, Access Codes, charts or any other extra material.