#decadence

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#sexual-personae #the-birth-of-the-western-eye #art

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. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#devil #horror #horror

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#death #decadence #funerals #death

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