# Quote — Emil 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. . .

- Author: [Emil Cioran](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emil-cioran.md)
- Book: [A Short History of Decay](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emil-cioran/a-short-history-of-decay.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran#A_Short_History_of_Decay_(1949)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/emil-cioran/a-short-history-of-decay/but-where-is-the

## More from this book

> So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emil-cioran/a-short-history-of-decay/so-long-as-man.md)

> I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emil-cioran/a-short-history-of-decay/i-find-in-myself.md)

> Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emil-cioran/a-short-history-of-decay/man-starts-over.md)