"Decadence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... variety, liveliness, and picturesqueness. 'As a master of style Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began to fall into decadence.... The periodic structure of Latin prose, which had been developed by Cicero, is carried by him to an even greater complexity and used with a greater daring and freedom.... His imagination never fails ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... with a strange abundance. There is a beauty in the blossoms too of an almost exotic kind, a taint of deeper pink that shocks the Puritan flowers. Two hundred generations ago (generations, I mean, of roses) this was a village street; there was a floral decadence when they left their simple life and the roses came from the wilderness to clamber round ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... philosophic suggestions that may be gathered from the title. The younger set comes into our society fresh and unspoiled with each generation, and in its way contributes something of freshness, something of vigor to keep the social world from going down hill on a grade of decadence. The story deals with a man who, although still young, feels that his life is practically over because his marriage, through no fault of his own, has proved a failure and ended in divorce. He meets a young girl just introduced into society, ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... seemed to Katherine that he had been breakfasting in bed for ages, and might continue to do so for another cycle without change. Her inexperience took no warning from the rapidly developing signs of decadence and failing force which Mr. Newton perceived; and, on the whole, she found her task of housekeeper and caretaker less ungrateful since weakness had subdued her uncle, and the friendly lawyer ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... phenomenon that will in time become historical, that phenomenon being the sudden growth, in all parts of Europe, of a fungus-literature bred of Foulness and Decay; and contemporaneously, the intrusion into all parts of human life of a Calvinistic yet materialistic Morality. This literature of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its own uncleanness, and its leading characteristics are gloom, ugliness, prurience, preachiness, and weedy flabbiness of style. That it has not flourished in Great Britain, save among a small and discredited Cockney minority, is due to the inherent manliness ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
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