#decadence

Decadent cooks go one step further and make sculptures of the food itself. If life is to be spent in pursuit of the extravagant, the extreme, the grotesque, the bizarre, then one's diet should reflect the fact. Life, meals, everything must be as artificial as possible - in fact works of art. So why not begin by eating a few statues? ↗

— Medlar Lucan

#decadence #decadent #food #art

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

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

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

— Paul Verlaine

#decadence #empire #end #i #i am

Everyone is always proclaiming the decline of civilization, but it takes a true prophet to look into his wine glass and embody it. ↗

— Bauvard

#decadence #funny #humor #prophets #funny

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological. ↗

— Charles Bernheimer

#decadent #emile-zola #feminine #joris-kerl-huysmans #nature

The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off. ↗

— Benito Mussolini

#birth #bound #decadence #empires #fate

The famous courtesan Clarimonde died recently, as the result of an orgy which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something infernally magnificent. They revived the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra. Great God! what an age this is in which we live! The guests were served by swarthy slaves speaking an unknown tongue, who to my mind had every appearance of veritable demons; the livery of the meanest among them might have served as a gala-costume for an emperor. There have always been current some very strange stories concerning this Clarimonde, and all her lovers have come to a miserable or a violent end. It has been said that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe that she was Beelzebub in person. ↗

— Théophile Gautier

#orgy #vampire #age

They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end. ↗

— Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly

#death #decadence #dissolution #life #death

Lady Sarah Henbery was his hostess, and the inspired projector of a new scheme of existence (that was, in effect, the repudiation of any scheme) that had become quite the 'thing.' She had found life an arbitrary design - a coil of days (like fancy pebbles, dull or sparkling) set in the form of a mainspring, and each gem responsible to the design. Then she had said, 'To-day shall not follow yesterday or precede to-morrow'; and she had taken her pebbles from their setting and mixed them higgledy-piggledy, and so was in the way to wear or spend one or the other as caprice moved her. And she became without design and responsibility, and was thus able to indulge a natural bent towards capriciousness to the extent that - having a face for each and every form of social hypocrisy and licence - she was presently hardly to be put out of countenance by the extremist expression of either. It followed that her reunions were popular with worldlings of a certain order. ("The Accursed Cordonnier") ↗

— Bernard Capes

#decadent #decadents #design