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Decadence Quotes

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Decadence Quotes

“Естер без перебільшення зіткнувся в ній зі «слабоумством», поглибленим до меж хворобливої жаги перемоги, і «дешевим розрахунком», втіленим у якесь неотесане хуторянство, такою глибоко пекельною сумішшю грубості, нечулості, шкідницької ненависті й буйного хамства, проти якого він десятиліттями виявлявся безсилим.”

ValuesIndividualityDecadenceRudenessVirtues
Book:The Melancholy of Resistance
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“But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much misery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then. It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care.”

HappinessHumanityChangeWealthPovertyBalanceMiseryIntensityDecadenceTimes
Book:How to Stop Time
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“There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits. The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you! You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes. The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out.”

HonestyEyesPortraitsDecadencePaintingsGaze
Book:Monsieur de Phocas
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“(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty shapes - the presence of something unknown and pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable - the unloving and the unloved - there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death - the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain. ("The Lifted Veil")”

DeathDespairHopelessnessRomanticismDecadence
Book:The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies
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“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”

ArtConsciousnessEvolutionDecadence
Book:Blindsight
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“Hidden away behind the closed doors of aristocratic and bourgeois privilege, concealed under those ultra-respectable masks of black frock coat and veil, the green glow of corruption flickers into sight, steadies, and spreads everywhere, fostered by Lorrain's horrified and complicitous gaze. This decadent detective is at one with the criminal he pursues, acknowledging openly that the representation of corruption is one of the most pleasurable forms that corruption can take. In this enterprise, art is the mask that both exposes and conceals culpability.”

ArtCrimeCorruptionDecadenceCriminalCulpabilityLorrainRespectibility
Author:Jennifer Birkett
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“In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.”

ArtDeathNatureIllusionEmptyDeadRomanticismDecadenceMorbidArtificeDecadent
Book:The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
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“Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art.”

ArtSicknessBourgeoisSymbolismSubversiveDecadencePerversityDecadentDeviantMarginalLiterature Decay
Author:Asti Hustvedt
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“That was when Estefania, who had made her pain the world’s pain, stood up, her knees dirty, shaking, her tights torn. She took a distanced look around and then she started tearing her tights even more. She kicked her expensive shoes through the wind, then she ripped off her dress, screaming as if it were burning, her second skin, her role as an actress, her one-woman show, as if she herself were on fire, as if her clothes were drenched in acid and abandoned love.”

PainLiteratureGriefHeartacheNarcissismAbandonmentDecadenceWithin Paravent Walls
Book:Within Paravent Walls
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“The unconscious is very serious today - even a little bit sad - because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and offhandedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, which would surface in our dreams and our slips, in our neuroses and madness. But isn't it already that way, in a sense? Television will perhaps only have been invented in order, by a delectable detour, to give back its force to the silence of the image. We certainly have to accept an authority, but one more stupid than ourselves. That is the great law of the political world. This is wonderfully apparent in the USSR (Zinoviev tells of the pharaonic stupidity of the Soviet leaders, equalled only by the pharaonic servitude of the Soviets themselves), but you can see it in France just as clearly. Why prefer Marchais, Le Pen, Chirac and other such hollow figures to more sophisticated people? Why have they not long ago sunk beneath their own idiocy? The fact is that these figures are the surest remedy against the anxiety we all feel at the reign and the primacy of intelligence. They reassure us about our own stupidity, and this is their vital function as it was that of the shaman. And how can you ward off stupidity, if not by a greater stupidity? I notice that on windows which have been left untouched, which have not, in other words, seen the faintest shadow of a duster for ten years, there is not more than a fraction of a millimetre of dirt and dust. No more, in the end, than the wind and rain scratch from the surface of a rock in the same period. There is a dreamlike slowness to both erosion and sedimentation.”

FateTelevisionAuthorityIronyUnconsciousDecadence
Book:Cool memories
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“O corpo coletivo funciona como um corpo individual: se o sistema é neurótico, ele engendra espontaneamente estruturas autodestruidoras. Quando o inconsciente coletivo supervaloriza a maternidade através da mídia e da indústria do entretenimento - esses instrumentos de poder -, não se trata de amor pelo feminino ou de um ato de bondade global. A mãe portadora de todas as virtudes nada mais é do que o corpo coletivo que se prepara para a regressão fascista. O poder outorgado por um Estado doentio é forçosamente suspeito.”

PowerMadnessDecadenceSimulation
Book:King Kong théorie
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“The Old Woman asked, "Here you are, dear Youth, you are looking at the Garden and do not know that it is an evil Garden. Here you are waiting for the Beautiful Woman and do not know that her beauty is destructive. You have been living in my room for two years and never before have you become so engrossed as you have today. Apparently your turn has come too. Go away from the window before it is too late, do not breathe the evil fragrance of these deceitful flowers and do not wait for the Beautiful Woman to appear below your window and enchant you. She will come, she will enchant you, and you will follow her against your will. Speaking thus, the Old Woman lit two candles on the table where some books were lying, banged the window shut and drew the curtain tightly across the window. The curtain rings scraped lightly along the bronze curtain rod, and the yellow linen of the curtain fluttered and once again lay motionless — and the room became cheerful, comfortable and peaceful. And it seemed that there was no longer any garden beyond the window, nor was there any sorcery in the world, and everything was simple, ordinary, and would remain so once and for all. ("The Poison Garden")”

YouthInnocencePoisonSeductionDecadence
Book:Silver Age of Russian Culture
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“Jestem sama we wrogim świecie. Ludzka twarz jest odrażająca. To dobrze. Chcę rozgłosu i przemocy, i chcę się roztrzaskać jak kamień o skały. Lubię kominy fabryczne i dźwigi, i ciężarówki. Lubię pochody twarzy i twarzy, i twarzy, zniekształconych, obojętnych. Mam dość ładności. Mam dość odosobnienia. Unoszę się na wzburzonej wodzie i zatonę, i nikt mnie nie uratuje.”

LonelinessNihilismDecadenceImpressionismTurpism
Book:The Waves
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“Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny smile. 'I like that idea. It's reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it means we can't, after all, go so far afield as we might,' he hesitated, 'yes, as we might.' Eastman looked at him sourly. 'Cavenaugh, when you've practiced law in New York for twelve years, you find that people can't go far in any direction, except-' He thrust his forefinger sharply at the floor.'Even in that direction, few people can do anything out of the ordinary. Our range is limited. Skip a few baths, and we become personally objectionable. The slightest carelessness can rot a man's integrity or give him ptomaine poisoning. We keep up only be incessant cleansing operations, of mind and body. What we call character, is held together by all sorts of tacks and strings and glue. ("Consequences")”

CharacterIntegrityCorruptionSecretsDeclineDecadence
Book:American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
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“I know that [civilized men] do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains.... But when I see [barbarous man] sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.”

FreedomCivilizationIndependenceInequalityDecadenceSedentary
Book:Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
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“He locked himself up in his sanctuary of art and carried the keys with him at all times. He maintained the social façade for financial security. The more tragedies were shackled to his name, the more demand there was for his public persona to clean up after the family name and showcase his art to overshadow his domestic disasters. His prominent reputation in the limelight of the town kept buzzing while the man behind the infamy withered in privacy.”

CreativitySolitudeIsolationFrustrationFatherhoodArtistryDecadenceWithin Paravent Walls
Book:Within Paravent Walls
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“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.”

LifeMankindDecadence
Book:The Angels of Perversity
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“Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence." He tells how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names. "Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie - the idea that men are brothers and are created equal." Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens' suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it. I remember a different whipping. "Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!" There's more laughter across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call Demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy. "Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not. It is against the Noble Lie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into Decadence.”

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Book:Red Rising
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“However, there are other, more political forms for these tendencies hostile to Western models. All of these countries that we want to acculturate by force with the principles of political and economic rationality, with the global market and democracy, with a universal principle and a history that is not their own, of which they have neither the ends nor the means - all of these countries which make up the rest of the world - they give us the impression (in Brazil for example) that they will never be accultured to this exogenous model of calculation and growth, that they are deeply allergic to it. And in fact do we, Westerners, masters of the world, still have its ends and means? Do we still measure up to this universal undertaking of mastery that now seems to surpass us in every domain and function like a trap of which we are the first victims?”

FailureBrazilDecadenceSimulation
Book:The Agony of Power
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“There is no point in building. There is no more real estate, no more life annuities. There are no more concessions in perpetuity in any cultural cemeteries. Isn’t it better that way? When a meteorite breaks up in space, it is the dazzling trace of its end which stands out. With a celestial body in orbit, it is the ellipse that is the most precious. No ancestors, no heritage, no heirs, no capital. For centuries we have had to accumulate. It is equally obvious that we have to squander everything in a single generation. The future belongs to those who have accumulated everything, then unburdened themselves of it in a single lifetime. You have to move quickly. Ten years to soak up a culture, twenty years to expel it, spew it out ( this part always takes longer). Nothing is interesting unless it passes through the entire cycle of the symbolic murder of culture.”

American DreamDecadence
Book:Cool memories
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