#decadence

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

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

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

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

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!" That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun. ↗

— Rachilde

#decadents #hysteric #lust #nun #passion

An impending sense of doom, a weariness of decadence - these are the deep concerns of a generation which charges into the darkness naked holding wine spritzers. ↗

— Bauvard

#fate #funny #humor #funny

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

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment. ↗

— Jennifer Birkett

#decadents #guilt #masochism #murder #punishment

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