Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Decadent. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Decadent Quotes And Sayings by 91 Authors including Seyyed Hossein Nasr,Eileen Green,Wilfrid Sheed,Paul Verlaine,Thomas Pynchon for you to enjoy and share.
Each decade absolutizes its own fashions of thought and action without the least pause and consideration of the fact that a decade later those very fashions and ideas will be buried in the dustbin of history as one turns to a new decade.
Where will Decadent Romance and Intrigue, Lead you?
How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.
I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.
To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
Mistress-like, its brilliance vain, highly capricious and inane ...
Living in a world where people measure their happiness by self-indulgence and decadence, Is like watching a whole society being pushed into the abyss of perpetual decay and aberrations.
Like Belgian chocolate - absolutely sinful and completely irresistible'.
Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
There is nothing more vulgar than sophisticated kitsch.
But now, all of a sudden, there appeared before me the absurd, loathsomely spiderish notion of debauchery, which, without love, crudely and shamelessly begins straight off with that which is the crown of true love.
Those who are ignorant of history and the evolution of taste are apt at every turn to make the present age their standard, and imagine nothing so barbarous or savage but what is contrary to the manners of their own time.
It was the heart of any true moment of decadence: the knowledge that an epoque is already slipping from us, inexorably, even in the moment of its glory.
I came to understand that the perception that freedom is decadence is a fictitious one. Freedom is a good that is preserved and defended because it places individual responsibility at the heart of society.
It is no longer enough to be lusty. One must be a sexual gourmet.
Anything more low, obscene, feculent, the manifold heaving's of history have not cast up. We shall come to the worship of onions, cats and things vermiculite.
Nothing is so atrocious as fancy without taste.
This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime
Vulgar of manner, overfed, Overdressed and underbred; Heartless, Godless, hell's delight, Rude by day and lewd by night. - Byron RufusNewton
There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.
A foolish picture I live in disgust, degradation being eaten by lust.
Capricious, wanton, bold, and brutal Lust Is meanly selfish; when resisted, cruel; And, like the blast of Pestilential Winds, Taints the sweet bloom of Nature's fairest forms.
What we are doing now is more than lovemaking, more than fucking, more than anything we've ever done. It's primal, it's need, but it's more. It's not ravenous or rushed. This right here, this is decadent.
Modern man has yielded to the harsh, the crude, the vulgar, the profane, the immoral.
What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment.
The product of extraordinary wealth allied to a taste for the sumptuous.
The history of prevailing status quos shows decay and decadence infecting the opulent materialism of the Haves. The spiritual life of the Haves is a ritualistic justification of their possessions.
Indescribably delirious!
The look is elegant and sacrilegious and makes me feel sacred and immoral.
Haute couture and getting hauter.
to have to combat one's instincts - that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
Only the chaste are truly obscene.
The good opinion of the vulgar is injurious.
unbounded vanity.
Here, I thought, I had found the human race in its final stages of decadence perverse, insouciant, without ambition. And I could not blame them. After all, they had no future.
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.
A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.
Despite noble depravity, there was something intoxicating about high society.
Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic.
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
In these latter years wealth has brought avarice in its train, and the unlimited command of pleasure has created in men a passion for ruining themselves and everything else through self-indulgence and licentiousness.
Intemperance is the plaque of sensuality, and temperance is not its bane but its seasoning.
There, display and extravagance, in dress, in furniture, in costly entertainments, are startling. They seem to push you back into a corner, like a poor intruder at a feast; they are apt to make you envious, or take your breath away with amazement.
Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.
With Torin stretched over her, his weight pinning her down, his heat and scent surrounding her, she was utterly consumed with pleasure. It saturated her bones, submerged her mind, tickled her every cell. She was alive with decadent sensation.
It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times
the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie
seem attractive by comparison.
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not.
Deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac ... It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.
The corruption of morals is a consequence of decadence (weakness of the will, need for strong stimuli).
There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.
Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery: nothing else holds fashion.
Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.
Swinish gluttony never looks to heaven amidst its gorgeous feast; but with besotted, base ingratitude, cravens and blasphemes his feeder.
Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low.
striving for fabulousness.
Steeped like a teabag in aristocratic pretensions ...
The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.
When sages commend excess, Desire is sick.
Those very superficial sensualists and profligates who lead the dance of Latin decadence have not seen, among their dancing girls and their pennies, that the disappearance of symbols was a precursor to the ruin of a people; communities only have abstract reasons for existing...
How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!
no longer a sort of decadence but, rather, a dictatorship of horror, a programmed genocide of which the Western powers are guilty. This relentless campaign against life is a new, definitive stage in the relentless campaign against God's plan.
Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.
How sad is it when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not.
Man's drive for self-expression, which over the centuries has built his monuments, does not stay within its bounds; the creations which yesterday were detested and the obscene become the classics of today.
Those vices [luxury and neglect of decent manners] are vices of men, not of the times.
[Lat., Hominum sunt ista [vitia], non temporum.
The queer and strange, the unrestrained, the grotesque is not only interesting: it is valuable. It is not always necessary to purge it out altogether in order to attain to the Sublime.
If it was occasionally ludicrous, it was always sublime. [Estelle Jussim on the 19th century Cult of the Beautiful.]
Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
Materialism and self-centeredness are the great vices of our age.
I'd like to think of myself as the flavor of the decade.
Sordid and infamous sensuality, the most dreadful evil that issued from the box of Pandora, corrupts every heart, and eradicates every virtue. Fly! wherefore dost thou linger? Fly, cast not one look behind thee; nor let even thy thought return to the accursed evil for a moment.
Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes. It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore,
Luxury is an enticing pleasure, a bastard mirth, which hath honey in her mouth, gall in her heart, and a sting in her tail.
lush and flagitious mistresses. It
I'm proud of the two adjectives, superficial and frivolous.
The air of fashion, which many young people are so eager to attain, always strikes me like the studied attitudes of some modern prints, copied with tasteless servility after the antigue; the soul is left out, and none of the parts are tied together by what may properly be termed character.
It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.
Fashionability is a kind of elevated vulgarity.
In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
A travesty that for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in the literature of that day.
Your soul may be the epitome of putrescent decay, but apart from minor scarring you know perfectly well that you are quite decadently appealing."
His pale eyes widened, and then he explored in laughter. "I don't know which enchants me more, putrescent decay or decadently appealing.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
incurable lover of the grotesque
In a world of travail and cheap wine the ridiculous becomes sublime
He whom common, gross, or stale objects allure, and when obtained, content, is a vulgar being, incapable of greatness in thought or action.
Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is.
But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are.
abysmally beshitted.
Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
Adultery is extravagance.
It is the stain and disgrace of the age to envy virtue, and to be anxious to crush the very flower of dignity.
This is the golden age of grotesque.
How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners ...
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
It is ... marvellous ... to have a period of apparent fanaticism. No obstacle can discourage you. The single vision of your quest obscures defeat and lifts you over mountainous difficulties.
Luxury, that alluring pest with fair forehead, which, yielding always to the will of the body, throws a deadening influence over the senses, and weakens the limbs more than the drugs of Circe's cup.
Lust is inseparably accompanied with the troubling of all order, with impudence, unseemliness, sloth, and dissoluteness.
What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without pleasure - as an automaton of "duty"? This is the very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy.