Alfred de Musset  - Quotes

 The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer 

Tags: artists   creativity   decadence   decadent     


Jean Lorrain  - Quotes

 The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations. 

Tags: boredom   cowardice   decadence   government   nature   rich   society   wealth   wealthy     
Octave Mirbeau  - Quotes

 After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes, our impoverished lovemaking. Her soul had remained over there, among the gigantic, poisonous flowers. She missed the mystery of old temples and the ardor of a sky blazing with fever, sensuality and death. The better to relive all these magnificent, raging memories, she became a recluse, spending entire days lying about on tiger skins, playing with those pretty Nepalese knives 'which dissipate one's dreams'. 

Tags: decadence   decadent   exoticism   orientalism     


Joris-Karl Huysmans  - Quotes

 (Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime  

Tags: baudelaire   decadence   decadent   sickness     
Mae West  - Quotes

 I use to be Snow White, but I drifted. 

Tags: decadence   purity   virginity     
Charles Baudelaire  - Quotes

 We revel in the laxness of the path we take. 

Tags: decadence   laziness     
Gustave Flaubert  - Quotes

 Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest  

Tags: decadence   life   mankind     
Charles Baudelaire  - Quotes

 If rape or arson, poison or the knife

Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff

Of this drab canvas we accept as life -

It is because we are not bold enough!
 

Tags: debauchery   decadence   poetry     
Tom Robbins  - Quotes

 Jerusalem was capital of southern Israel, known then as Judah. Isn't it true that there's always a rivalry between north and south? North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Northern and Southern Ireland, Yankees and Rebels, uptown and downtown. Somebody please tell me why that is? Maybe southerners get too much sun, like Mr. Sock over there, frying his threads, and northerners don't get enough (although I hardly think northern Israel a cool spot in the shade), but southern peoples--tropical and downtown types--always seem to lean toward decadence, whereas uptown, in the north, progress is favored. Decadence and progress obviously are at odds. 

Tags: decadence   jerusalem   northerners   progress   rivalry   southerners     
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly  - Quotes

 They had...finished their lives before their death  

Tags: atheism   death   decadence   dissolution   life     
J.G. Ballard  - Quotes

 Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence. 

Tags: burial   death   decadence   funerals     
Dorothy Parker  - Quotes

 Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. 

Tags: cashmoney   decadence     
Mae West  - Quotes

 Too much of a good thing can be wonderful! 

Tags: decadence   indulgence     
Charles Baudelaire  - Quotes

 The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;

We find delight in the most loathsome things;

Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,

And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
 

Tags: decadence   devil   horror     
Remy de Gourmont  - Quotes

 Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise. 

Tags: decadence   life   mankind     
Novalis  - Quotes

 There is an energy which springs from sickness and debility: it has a more powerful effect than the real, but, sadly, expires in an even greater infirmity. 

Tags: decadence   sickness     
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly  - Quotes

 For a decadent like Baudelaire the only possible ends are suicide or the foot of the cross 

Tags: decadence   decadents     
Aaron Harang  - Quotes

 For  

Tags: decadence   decadent   libertinism     
Joris-Karl Huysmans  - Quotes

 In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a curiosity that was too sharp to be crushed immediately, a lack of order in his ideas, a weakening of his spiritual boundaries, which were promptly twisted, an excessive passion for running along forked roads and wearying of the path as soon as he had started on it, mental indigestion demanding varied dishes, quickly tiring of the foods he desired, digesting almost all, but badly, was his state. 

Tags: decadence   decadents     
Remy de Gourmont  - Quotes

 The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence. 

Tags: decadence   scoundrel   silence     


Quotes of the Day