I think that Cioran intended this book to be an enjoyable read, to be a fun read despite the darkness of some the subject matter, the flowery language intended to be a fun use of language.

By dwelling on the infinity of death, thought manages to use it up to inspire disgust for it in us, disgust, that negative superfluity which spares nothing and which, before compromising and diminishing the prestige of death, shows us the inanity of life. But while the saints were never to collapse, these others found themselves at the mercy of their own game, masters and victims of their whims—true solitaries, since their solitude was sterile. And I dream of an Eleusis of disabused hearts, of a lucid Mystery, without gods and without the vehemences of illusion. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain—spectators of the human convulsion—the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. In the 1940s, against the backdrop of world war, Cioran began a project originally entitled Exercices négatifs (Negative Exercises), then Penseur d’occasion (Second-Hand Thinker), before finally becoming Précis de decomposition, or A Short History of Decay, in the present translation.Here certitudes abound: suppress them, best of all suppress their consequences, and you recover paradise. Men can be classified according to the most whimsical criteria: according to their humors, their inclinations, their dreams, or their glands. He was a Romanian philosopher and I’ve known about him since I was a teenager, but I haven’t read any of his books. If life had a single argument in its favor—distinct, indisputable—it would annihilate itself; instincts and prejudices collapse at the contact of Rigor. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.

We must be thankful to the civilizations which have not taken an overdose of seriousness, which have played with values and taken their pleasure in begetting and destroying them. Only these two groups are emancipated, the former by doubt, the latter by dementia, from the insipid obsession of being useful. His poorly constituted blood has allowed the infiltration of uncertainties, approximations, problems; his wavering vitality, the intrusion of question marks and exclamation points.His mother has Alzheimer's, his father has recently had a stroke, and his girlfriend has recently broken up with him. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history-focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science-in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. But what he is a thousand definitions expose and none compels recognition: the more arbitrary they are, the more valid they seem.

It is our incapacity to weep which sustains our taste for things, which makes them exist at all: it keeps us from exhausting their savor and from turning away.

When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verification of the disease. Thereby we find more prestige in expression than in the soul which supports it, in grace than in intuition; emotion itself becomes polite. The poverty of expression which is the mind’s poverty, is manifest in the indigence of words, in their exhaustion and their degradation: the attributes by which we determine things and sensations finally lie before us like so much verbal carrion.