[3] Although Cioran refused most literary prizes awarded him,[4] he accepted the Rivarol as recognition of his first French work, the language he would write in for the rest of his life.

These themes include a dissatisfaction with the world, his views on the futility of life, antinatalism, and anti-Christian sentiments: Having lived out—having verified all the arguments against life—I have stripped it of its savors...

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.

[5]Having exhausted his appetites, the man who approaches a limit-form of detachment no longer wants to perpetuate himself; he loathes surviving in someone else, to whom moreover he has nothing more to transmit; the species appalls him; he is a monster—and monsters do not beget.

Hating You, I have escaped the sugar mills of Your kingdom, the twaddle of Your puppets... Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it?

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.

This passage is a revision of a piece included in the earlier book Tears and Saints;[11] the characteristic phrase "If God were a cyclops, Spain would be His eye" is found in both works.

[1] Carla Thomas of the Goddard College Department of Philosophy praised the book's prose, describing Cioran as a "master of cynicism, of the sardonic aperçu and the trenchant aphorism.

"[14] Nathan Knapp of the Times Literary Supplement spoke positively of the sense of dread Cioran depicted within the book, and writing in 2019, said that "he is exactly the kind of thinker our present moment most richly deserves.

Sections of A Short History of Decay were interpreted by Cioran biographer Marta Petreu as a "sideways apology" for his previous support of the Iron Guard.