#decadence

You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep ↗

— Alfred de Musset

#decadent #god #life #beauty

Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#life #mankind #beauty

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#anything #applied #become #concepts #critics

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#barbarism #between #civilization #country #decadence

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence. ↗

— Paul Verlaine

#decadence #empire #end #i #i am

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined. ↗

— Milos Forman

#branded #dangerous #decadence #everybody #first

Decadence is wonderful. ↗

— Jack L. Chalker

#wonderful

You gotta eat right, you gotta have healthy habits, you know, and balance out your decadence with a healthy lifestyle during the day. ↗

— Talib Kweli

#day #decadence #during #eat #gotta

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic. ↗

— David Sarnoff

#between #brutal #decadence #difference #our

In a free society, government reflects the soul of its people. If people want change at the top, they will have to live in different ways. Our major social problems are not the cause of our decadence. They are a reflection of it. ↗

— Cal Thomas

#cause #change #decadence #different #different ways