"Decadent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if into an abyss, and come down with a thump. Sometimes, but rarely, a man will fall off. It is a throne—and perhaps this is true of all thrones—from which no altogether self-satisfactory descent is possible; and we all know it, sitting behind our newspapers, or staring down on decadent Greece shining at our feet, or examining with curious, furtive glances those calendars the feminine beauty of which seems peculiar to shoe-blacking parlors, and has sometimes led us to wonder whether the late Mr. Comstock ever ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy (1898); Frances Fuller, To Edith May (1851); Metta Fuller, Lines to a Poetess (1851).] Someone has pointed out that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... said Rodriguez as soon as both were eating. "Morano," replied the servant, though it must not be supposed that when answering Rodriguez he spoke as curtly as this; I merely give the reader the gist of his answer, for he added Spanish words that correspond in our depraved and decadent language of to-day to such words as "top dog," "nut" and "boss," so that his speech had a certain grace about it in that far-away time ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... unprejudiced examination." An unprejudiced man, I take it, is a man whose sentiments are the same as mine, and I happen to disagree with Mr. WILLOUGHBY as profoundly as possible on several of the themes he has chosen. On fox-hunting, for instance, which he considers a more decadent sport than bull-fighting; and on Ulster, which he attacks bitterly by comparison with the rest of Ireland, for cherishing antiquated political animosities and talking about the Battle of the Boyne. But will Mr. WILLOUGHBY not have been hearing of "the curse of CROMWELL"? Let us rather agree to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... great rock in a thirsty land. Dulness will be the New Genius. "Give us dull books," people will cry, "great dull restful pictures. We are weary, very weary." This hectic, restless, incessant phase in which we travail—fin-de-siecle, "decadent," and all the rest of it—will pass away. A chubby, sleepy literature, large in aim, colossal in execution, rotund and tranquil will lift its head. And this Crichton will become a classic, Messrs. Mudie will sell surplus copies of ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... has become decadent?—if my hand has lost its cunning? What if I am no longer worthy?' He was seized with such panic at the thought, that he set himself wildly to find some immediate means of proving to himself the irrational nature of his fears. He would instantly compose some difficult verses, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... among punishable offences at all. And then it is necessary to remember that many things that are indefensible when only a few do them, seem to become, by an extraordinary method of reasoning, regarded as allowable when so many people do them that a spurious public opinion and a decadent fashion is born, which shelters them and prevents the light of an unbiassed judgment from showing up their shortcomings in morality. One has only to read up old records of the eighteenth century to see ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Hogarth's moral force and grim satire. His serene, painstaking observation is never distracted by grossness and violence. The Venetians of his day may have been—undoubtedly were—effeminate, licentious, and decadent, but they were kind and gracious, of refined manners, well-bred, genial and intelligent, and so Longhi has transcribed them. In the time which followed, ceilings were covered by Boucher, pastels by Latour were in demand, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Commandment Summer Dreams The Breaking of Chains December 'The Way' The Leader to be The Greater Love Thank God for Life Time Enough New Year's Day Life is a Privilege In an Old Art Gallery True Brotherhood The Decadent Lord, speak again My Heaven Life God's Kin Conquest The Statue Sirius At Fontainebleau The Masquerade Sympathy Intermediary Life's Car Opportunity The Age of Motored Things New Year Disarmament The ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... to follow them on the march, the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching from day to day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare was, shows at least that the race is not yet decadent. Perhaps we should have done better. No one can know until we try it. If liberal treatment by the government and the course set by Secretary Root means anything, our staff ought to be better equipped for such a task than the English were; ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... He acted like one. No Celtic commander could have robbed his dead soldiers. In the province of belles-lettres John Bull can at least claim Alfred Austin, his present poet- laureate, and Oscar Wilde, the dramatic decadent. Dr. Jameson is England's military lion and President George T. Winston of the Texas 'varsity her representative of learning! The English proper are but "a nation of shopkeepers," and the greatest shops are not conducted by Anglo-Saxons. England's great manufacturers are Scots, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 12: I cannot see clearly through these transactions, the muddy waters of decadent Italian plot and counterplot being inscrutable to senses assisted by nothing more luminous than ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... "Selections." The reviewer began by thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent nihilism.... It is well," the writer continued, "when such reminders come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science—when from the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious cry of ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Scottish ways, which in his provincial simplicity he offered to the Carnegies. It seemed to him certain that people of Jacobite blood and many travels would have relished his clever talk, for it is not given to a national decadent to understand either the people he has deserted or the ancient houses at whose door he stands. Carnegie was the dullest man living in the matter of sneering, and Kate took an instant dislike to the mincing little man, whom ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... with Cervantes. After a life of heroic endeavor, disappointment, slavery, and poverty, the author of "Don Quixote" gave the world a serious work which caused to be laughed off the world's stage forever the final vestiges of decadent chivalry. ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... became convulsed with the most violent emotions directly the Young Lady in Grey appeared. It began an absolutely unprecedented Wabble—unprecedented so far as Hoopdriver's experience went. It "showed off"—the most decadent sinuosity. It left a track like one of Beardsley's feathers. He suddenly realised, too, that his cap was loose on his head and his ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... for absurd unreality. To live at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms, pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality of a decadent court or as the plaything of the leisure hours of a college of learning, and its insipid convention having become 'a literary plague in every European capital,' it finally disappeared from view amid the fopperies of the Roman Arcadia and the puerile ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the end of the eighteenth century possessed still another foil and counterpoise to its decadent rationalism. This was the so-called aesthetic-idealistic movement, which shades off into romanticism. The debt of Schleiermacher to that movement has been already hinted at. It was the revolt of those who had this in common with the pietists, that they hated and despised the outworn rationalism. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Litman of our Faculty spoke on "Jews and Modern Capitalism." Professor E. C. Baldwin of our English department, in speaking on "Prayer," roused a lively interest in the question as to whether prayer is decadent among the Jews. Professor Albert H. Lybyer lectured on "Jews as the Transmitters of Culture from the Moslems to the Christians"; Professor Boyd H. Bode discussed "What the Jew Contributes to American Ideals," and Dr. A. R. Vail spoke on "The Influence ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... The Decadent was speaking to his soul— Poor useless thing, he said, Why did God burden me with such as thou? The body were enough, ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... inside the restaurant door the head waiter's eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... days are retrograde. Sheep have fallen to a decadent race. Cheese has lost its cunning. Someone, alas, as the story says, has killed the hen that laid the golden egg. Mory's is sunk and gone. Its faded prints of the Old Brick Row, its tables carved with students' names, its brown Tobies in ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... ages. The course of art is known; it has been run many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail; technique is at first a hope, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Florestan, Mr. Manvers; Pizarro, Mr. Giubilei; and Rocco, Mr. Martyn. The opera was performed every night for a fortnight. Such a thing would be impossible now, but lest some one be tempted to rail against the decadent taste of to-day, let it quickly be recorded that somewhere in the opera—I hope not in the dungeon scene—Mme. Giubilei danced a pas de ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... held by some that man as the selector has developed beauty, more beauty than we had before; and we point to the charms of our women as compared with those of the squaw. The answer to this is that the squaw belongs to a decadent race; that she too is subject to the man, that the comparison to have weight should be made between our women and the women of the matriarchate—an obvious impossibility. We have not on earth women in a state of normal freedom and full development; but we ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... changes. The bat-like eyes of the multitude are blinded by the light of the sun. Why cannot we trust the Cosmic Law which has always given us a better ideal in the place of the decadent one? If we prefer to use the word God, then let us say why cannot ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... that a single personality could change an opposite course of thought, it must be held that Richard Wagner, in his own striking and decadent career, comes nearest to such a type. But he was clearly prompted and reinforced in his philosophy by other men and tendencies of his time. The realism of a Schopenhauer, which Wagner frankly adopted without its full significance (where primal will finds ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... seemed to be regarded as a relic of heathenish rites—a thing almost cannibalistic. When she elected to engage a woman and a "hired man" to manage her house, she felt the disapprobation of the entire village, as if she had sunk into some decadent ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... phases of this new type of tragic theme. Macbeth is destroyed by vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself; Hamlet is ruined by irresoluteness and contemplative procrastination. If Othello were not overtrustful, if Lear were not decadent in senility, they would not be doomed to die in the conflict that confronts them. They fall self-ruined, self-destroyed. This second type of tragedy is less lofty and religious than the first; but it is more human, ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... narrowness of nature that lacked even the capacity for infection. Jack had to own to himself that, though he strove to make it rigorously esthetic, his seeing of d'Annunzio—to take at random one of the fleurs du mal—was as a shining, a luridly splendid warning of what happened to decadent people in unpleasant Latin countries. Such lurid splendor was as far from him as the horrors of the Orestean Trilogy. In Mrs. Upton's eyes this distance, though a distinct advantage for him, was the result of no choice or conflict, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... strangled and stifled that promising poetical school, "Young Germany," to which Heine belonged. Let us recall this man, who likewise artificially revived the old religion and the old feudalism, who repolished and regilded the scutcheons of the decadent aristocracy, and who, despite all his energy, had at heart no belief in his work, no joy in his task, no faith in the anointed dummies he brought to life again in Europe—and those puzzling personalities ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... honors;'—and offers, in little, a curious eyehole into the then England, with its then lights and notions, which is now so deep-hidden from us, under volcanic ashes, French Revolutions, and the wrecks of a Hundred very decadent Years." ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... the northernmost point I had reached so far, and the neighbourhood of the art-loving Solomon Islands already made itself felt. Whereas in the New Hebrides every form of art, except mat-braiding, is at once primitive and decadent, here any number of pretty things are made, such as daintily designed ear-sticks, bracelets, necklaces, etc.; I also found a new type of drum, a regular skin-drum, with the skin stretched across one end, while the other is ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... formulating the principles of Inductive Reasoning in substitution for the Deductive methods by which the Schools had lived for centuries. Wherever the critic turns his glance, he can find no sign of the Decadent. In every field of life, in politics, in war, in religion, in letters, the Elizabethan was virile even in his vices. His offences against morals or against art were essentially of the barbaric not the effete order; as the splendours of his productions were the natural beauties ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... mass returns to the shelf and begins another circuit of faucet, counter and table. A dame so fat that she must remain permanently at anchor—the venerable Constitution of this fleet!—bawls postcards and matches. A man in pince-nez, a decadent doctor of philosophy, sells pale German cigars at three for ten pfennigs. Here we are among the plain people. They believe in Karl Marx, blutwurst and the Hofbraeuhaus. They speak a German that is half speech and half grunt. One passes them to ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... ax and shovel and plow, with sweat of labor and pain, they fought the wilderness and bought a foothold in the new commonwealth. What great luck that his exit from the old life should prove to be his entrance into the very heart of a simple multitude flying from the greed and stupidity of the decadent aristocracy of Europe! What fitness that he, child of a race which had triumphantly fought injustice, poverty, Indian, and wilderness, should now be leader for a people who had fled from injustice at home only to begin a new struggle with plotters ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... were recruited from the scum of human society. They were made up of bankrupts, decadent students, gamblers, topers, and beggars. They came from the ranks of those who had been pursued by misfortune and who bore the marks of crime. No one was too ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... (1) cadence, decadent, case, casual, casualty, occasion, accident, incident, mischance, cheat; (2) casuistry, coincide, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce—Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... crowds of people standing thick together; the Baptist in his sinewy strength and uncouth attire, surrounded by the little group of disciples; while through the throng a deputation of grey-beards, the representatives of a decadent religion, makes its difficult way—these are the principal features ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... covertly grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast of ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... slaves, &c, till almost the end of the first decade of the 19th century, the latest known bill of sale is dated March 21, 1807 and transfers a "Negro Woman named Nelly of the age of twenty five or thereabout." It was, however, decadent and from about the beginning of the 19th century was quite as much to the advantage of the Negro in many cases as that of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... surprise evident in the attitudes of his team-mates, too. No one had imagined that John Brown would have the nerve to cross Mooney beyond the giving of a reprimand. Not and hold the reputation which he had slaved so hard to preserve in turning out a winning eleven for decadent Elliott his first year there. The great John Brown might better have remained in permanent retirement, resting on his richly deserved laurels, than risk his halo of "wizard" and "miracle man of the gridiron" by failure to restore Elliott's ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... she disdained flamboyant types and snubbed the gay and gildy brand; Instead she loved a decadent whose pagan name was Hildebrand, Until that sad occasion when she met him coming back o' night, His system loaded up with bhang and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... Vinci Francis never succeeded in retaining a first-rate painter in his service. Andrea del Sarto and Paris Bordone did little more than pay passing visits, and the famous school of Fontainebleau was founded by Rosso and Primaticcio, two decadent followers of Michel Angelo. The adventures of that second-rate artist and first-rate bully, Benvenuto Cellini, at Paris, form one of the most piquant episodes in artistic autobiography. After a gracious welcome from the king he was offered an annual retaining ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... for many generations afterwards, orthodox Christianity was often regarded as too materialistic for advanced thinkers. They endeavoured to make Christianity keep pace with the times by infusing into it the decadent Greek or Oriental mysticism which ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... figures of Faunus or Vertumnus, or one of those half-deities or quarter-deities that one sees among the marbles in public collections. "Graeco-Roman School, of the late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or God of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology." Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to be living again in this ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... body. We cannot sum up the effect by saying that this influence was either wholly good or bad—its relation to therapeutics was a mixed one. It can be truthfully said that nothing has retarded the science of medicine during the past two thousand years so much as the iron grip of decadent orthodoxy, and, on the other hand, no power has caused men and women so to sacrifice time, money, and even life itself for the care and nurture of the sick, as the example and precepts of ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... corner lies Mehemet Ali, the prince adventurous and chivalrous as some legendary hero, and withal one of the greatest sovereigns of modern history. There he lies behind a grating of gold, of complicated design, in that Turkish style, already decadent, but still so beautiful, which was that of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Secretary rejoined with a cynical laugh. "No, I reckon it as nothing. Protestantism in America is decadent. It has split, divided, and disintegrated, until it is scarcely recognizable. Its adherents are falling away in great numbers. Its weak tenets and senile faith hold but comparatively few and lukewarm supporters. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... there was no keeping him away from the subject. Ruined palaces and crumbling churches he dismissed with curt reference as mere frivolities, encouraging a morbid taste for the decadent. His duty, as he saw it, was not to lead us to dwell upon the ravages of time, but rather to direct our attention to the means of repairing them. What had we to do with broken-headed heroes, or bald-headed saints? Our interest should be surely in the ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... incidents in this scientific tragi-comedy is the fact that Weismann, the mainstay of contemporary decadent Darwinism, attacks with might and main its fundamental assumption, the transmission of acquired characters, whereas Eimer, who is thoroughly convinced that he has proved that doctrine, in his turn attacks Darwinism and proves with telling effect the impotence ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down to his pocket, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... the manuscript of l'Etrangere. It is not as DECADENT as you say. There are diamonds that sparkle brightly in this polychrome. Moreover, the decadences are transformations. The mountains in travail roar and scream, but they sing beautiful ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... persons, were frequent visitors to his house. His solicitude for her was so great that she found it difficult even to see her doctor except in his presence. And he bought her a pearl necklace that cost six hundred pounds. He was, in fact, one of those complete husbands who grow rare in these decadent days. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... features, small, beautifully shaped hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all her trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physical characteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression—as of an old stock run to seed. The stock had been reinvigorated in my mother, and one of its original elements which certainly survived in her temperament and tradition was of great importance both for her own life and for her children's. This was the Protestant—the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Barbarian invasions—the fifth century—the learned countries were Italy, France (especially Southern France) and Spain. Of these three, Italy may be described as stationary or even decadent, but she possessed greater accumulations of books than either of the other two. The result of the invasions was, no doubt, that libraries were destroyed and education dislocated; but there was another result, as we have lately begun to realize—namely, that ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... not a real Bostonian," our guest replied. "I'm not abusing you on behalf of a city that I'm a native proprietor of. If I were, I shouldn't perhaps make your decadent Easter Parade my point of attack, though I think it's a pity to let it spoil. I came from a part of the country where we used to make a great deal of Easter, when we were boys, at least so far as eggs went. I don't know whether the grown people ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... cross—it was her form of deep thought—was re-embroidering, with extra little stitches, and unnecessary little French knots, and elaborate little buttonholes that would never see a button, a large and fine piece of embroidery on which she had been working for many months. She had that decadent love of minute finish in the unessential so often seen in persons of a nervous ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... dead athwart the path—nay, more than dead; decadent, distinctly; a sorry sight for one that had known the fellow in more bustling circumstances. Nature might at least have paused to shed one tear over this rough jacketed little son of hers, for his wasted aims, his cancelled ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... race. These very grumblers are now foremost in praising, and quite rightly, the spirit shown in every part of their country. Their lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles, for if in truth England had been decadent there could have been no such universal display for them to be praising now. But all this democratic grumbling and habit of "going as you please" serve a deep purpose. Autocracy, censorship, compulsion destroy humor in a nation's ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Blenheim; and, as the old oaks recall the joyousness of the Middle Ages, and the elms and cedars have a certain air of eighteenth-century stateliness, so perhaps the orchids, with their exotic delicacy, may be held typical of the decadent present. From the house many treasures, once part of its adornment, are now missed; and while books, pictures, and gems have disappeared, modern ideas of comfort have suggested the insertion of electric lights and telephones. To regret the treasures of the past is a commonplace; it would ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... Alsace, and Lorraine by war, and Saxony and Bavaria by benevolent assimilation. The present Kaiser has already acquired Belgium by the former and Austria by the latter process. Like the Rome of Caesar, the German Empire is now at war on the one hand with decadent civilizations and on the other with a horde of barbarians. What Greece and Carthage were to Rome, France and England are to Germany, while Russia is the modern counterpart of the Gauls, Britons, and Germans of the Commentaries. ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... His fame was very limited—there were few who read his verses and prose, and even among these but a few who acknowledged his talent. His stories and lyrical poems were not distinguished by any especial obscurity or any especial decadent mannerisms. They bore the imprint of something strange and exquisite. It needed an especial kind of soul to appreciate this poetry which seemed so simple at the first glance, yet actually so ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... 'All decadent nations,' said H. Stackton Dunckley, 'produce beautiful women—it is one of the surest signs that they are going to pieces. The Romans did at the last, and Rome and England are parallel cases. As Mrs. Le Roy Jennings ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... a winter's evening and sit before it in silent mood until far into the night. And once, when his young wife had first occupied the new house, the big room had acquired a fairly cosy and comfortable appearance. But it had always been sparsely furnished, and most of the decadent furniture that now littered ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power—but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... woman for him in the world, and for her he had an infinite tenderness and an infinite respect. When that face faded from him, he saw all the other faces, and he saw no more difference than between sheep and sheep. Indeed, that curious love of the sordid, so common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so genuine, grew upon him, and dragged him into more and more sorry corners of a life which was never exactly "gay" to him. His father, when he died, left him in possession of an old dock, where for a time he lived in a mouldering house, in that squalid part of the ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... may cause a general war. Spain alone has anything to gain from such a contest; in it she would at least have allies, and would expect to see her thirst for revenge upon us gratified. The great powers of Europe, however, do not mean to risk an oecumenical convulsion for the sake of a decadent monarchy, which, considered as the trustee of colonies, has been tried in the balance and found wanting. They recognize that, in seeking to evade the sentence of rigorous isolation which the conscience of mankind ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... society from the outlaws whose only business in life is to prey upon society; and the second is the placing of these offenders in a position where they can be kept long enough for scientific treatment as decadent human beings, in the belief that their lives can be changed in their purpose. No specific time can be predicted in which a man by discipline can be expected to lay aside his bad habits and put on good habits, because no ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this sad truth which fosters in most of us the belief that we live in a decadent age, and that the days of our youth were infinitely more seemly than those which we now endure. But it is we who have changed: the bargains are still there, and may still be had at the cost of ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... ambitionless normality. They had decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment, which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond of. The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom's, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college, and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a minute without acute spinal disorders—Tom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan's wraith—at any rate, it ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... decadent, and are doomed to slavery under the man of the future. The future man will be a child of my race. My race is superior. From it the uberman will rise. You must help. Prey on these inferior peoples. They do not deserve ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... has retreated. The place is left to fishing folk and builders of the fishing craft, whose wharves still form the liveliest quarter. Wandering about its wide deserted courts and calli, we feel the spirit of the decadent Venetian nobility. Passages from Goldoni's and Casanova's Memoirs occur to our memory. It seems easy to realise what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani. Baffo walks beside ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... try to go along with the analogy that a human society is like an atomic pile. At one extreme you will have a dying, decadent culture—the remains of a highly mechanized society—living off its capital, using up resources it can't replace because of a lost technology. When the last machine breaks and the final food synthesizer collapses ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... serious drama which English poets of the Shakespearean age conceived, created, and left as models impossible to reproduce or to rival in any generation of poets or readers, actors or spectators, after the decadent forces of English genius in its own most natural and representative form of popular and creative activity had finally shrivelled up and shuddered into everlasting inanition under the withering blast of Puritanism. Before that blight had fallen upon the country of Shakespeare, the variety and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the hands of the fin-de-siecle gilded youths we see about us during the Christmas holidays. Such foppery, such luxury, such insolence, was surely never practised by the scented, overbearing patricians of the Palatine, even in Rome's most decadent epoch. In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom. With his airs of young milord, his fast ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... fear gripped the weary aviator. This was too much! Bad as it was to have Richard Alden captured by these weird descendants of a long vanished race, it was far worse to have him fall into the hands of their deadly enemies, the Jarmuthians, decadent survivors of Israel's Five Lost Tribes. The possibility of a rescue now seemed hopelessly and crushingly vague and distant. What could ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... increase, all play their part. In this age of intense living, it is not to be wondered at that many shrink from the responsibility of rearing children, and the same conditions that contribute to this decadent ideal intensifies sex-hunger, and it is this dominating passion that tolerates and makes possible the most frightful crime of the age—infanticide. Greece and Rome paved the way for their ultimate annihilation when their beautiful women ceased to bear children and their men ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... how decadent I am," she sighed. "I want to toy with my pleasures. Besides, there's that scamp of a brother of mine coming up to have a drink—I saw him get out of a taxi—and you couldn't get it through in time, not ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... letters and on people are, if a trifle rambling, at any rate delightfully critical and much more interesting and profound than certain others which flow periodically from the windows of cloistered retreats. Mr. Henry Savile quotes from the Classics perhaps a little too freely for the taste of a decadent age, and his friends, Dr. Ashford, Lady Grace, the bishop's wife, Olive, her niece, and Philip Daly, nephew of an archdeacon and parliamentary candidate for Sunningwell, would be a little more amusing if they were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... sticks, which he flung to the ground by the fire. They were the spears the men had made, rough, crude implements compared with the balanced and decorated weapons their fathers had known, but such as would serve to satisfy the hereditary impulse of a decadent race for the weapons of their sires. With one accord the men reached out and seized them, springing to their feet, and standing, with quivering muscles and tremulous hands, as the struggle between inherited instinct and acquired fear went on for ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... around our decadent circles long enough," she said soberly. Then she did laugh. "Don't hate me, Trigger! Anyway, it's very high fashion. It's also"—her glance went quickly over Trigger—"in excellent taste, in this case. It's a ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... fulfilled under reasonably favorable circumstances. If a race does not have plenty of children, or if the children do not grow up, or if when they grow up they are unhealthy in body and stunted or vicious in mind, then that race is decadent, and no heaping up of wealth, no splendor of momentary material prosperity, can avail in any degree as offsets. The Congress has the same power of legislation for the District of Columbia which the State legislatures have for the various States. The problems incident to our highly complex modern ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... universe to find a race which will serve their purpose and they have chosen us to be the victims. When their fleet gets here, they plan to capture thousands of selected children and carry them to Mercury in order to infuse their blood into the decadent race of slaves they have. Those who are not suitable for breeding when they grow up will die as slaves in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... knew him, of but poor mental calibre, Alexander is, perhaps, to be as much pitied as blamed. His nerves, so Mr. Chedo Miyatovitch told me, never recovered from the shock of a boating accident when young. He was the last and decadent scion of the Obrenovitches and was marked down from ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... translation. Only the pious loyalty of national sentiment can assign a high place in dramatic literature to Wagner's work with its intended imitation of the alliterative form of verse; while his philosophizing gods and goddesses are also but decadent modern representatives ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... up close to him, and there was no sign of decadent force in the grip of his arms. He kissed her; and Hazel, in blind rage, freed one arm, and struck at him man fashion, her hand doubled into a small fist. By the grace of chance, the blow landed on his nose. There was force enough ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... or as the Cathedral at Wuerzburg; but still it is badly baroque, though, again, not so baroque in the architecture as in the sculpture. In the statues of most of the saints and popes it could not be more baroque; they swagger in their niches or over their tombs in an excess of decadent taste for which the most bigoted agnostic, however Protestant he may be, must generously grieve. It is not conceivably the taste of the church or the faith; it is the taste of the wicked world, now withered and wasted to powerlessness, which overruled both for evil in art from its evil life. ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... is also meant, in another sense, which is also improper, the greater abundance of artistic intuitions and the smaller number of imperfect or decadent works which one epoch produces in respect to another. Thus it may be said that there was aesthetic progress, an artistic awakening, at the end of the thirteenth or of the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but very delicate and conspicuously aquiline. "A regular Roman nose," he used to say, "with my goiter I've quite the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period." He seemed ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... epoch of a great literary and prophetic outburst. Also it was an agitated time, presenting striking contrasts. At Jerusalem, an enlightened king was making a firm stand against the limitation of his power from within and against an almost invincible enemy from without. On the one side, society was decadent, on the other side arose the greatest moralists the world has ever seen, the prophets, the intrepid assailants of corruption. It was, finally, the period in which the noblest dreams of a better, an ideal humanity were dreamed. That is the time in which the author lets his ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... excursions to the Oi River. The taste of the time was typified in such vagaries as covering trees with artificial flowers in winter and in piling up snow so that some traces of snowy landscapes might still be seen in spring or summer. Such excess reminds the student of decadent Rome as portrayed by ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... was Lord Ronald Engleton, an orphan brought up in Paris, a would-be decadent, a dabbler in all modern iniquities, redeemed from folly only by a certain not altogether wholesome cleverness, yet with a disposition which sometimes gained for him friends in most unlikely quarters. He had excellent qualities, which he did ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... myself that this was so, and the whole atmosphere of the place is pregnant with the supreme importance of this struggle, which may well be the dying convulsions of decadent France. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... that had been gained by horny-handed labour. Thus might they postpone their deaths another month, thus might they still fill up papers, still go on wooing (legally) carnal women and await their heart's desire, the return of the decadent past. They were afraid to recognise that only one thing was left them, to rot in death—to die—that even the past they longed for was a way to death ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... farther, and does not hesitate to criticize the autocratic dilettantism which professes to lay down the law on artistic matters which it does not in the least understand. It is time (said one speaker) that our so-called Emperor should cease to be persuaded by the plaudits of a decadent and servile entourage into imagining Himself a Second Sarasatius. ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... at College during that bright brief period of the attempted apotheosis of the dirty-minded little Decadent whose stock in trade was a few Aubrey Beardsley drawings, a widow's-cruse-like bottle of Green Chartreuse, an Oscar Wilde book, some dubious blue china, some floppy ties, an assortment of second-hand epigrams, scent and scented ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... and vision of life; the chords are simple as Handel's, but they are as perfect. Lytton's work, although as vulgar as Verdi's is, in much the same fashion, sustained by a natural sense of formal harmony; but all that follows is decadent,—an admixture of romance and realism, the exaggerations of Hugo and the homeliness of Trollope; a litter of ancient elements in a state ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... provincial lives, and, in her good-nature, had permitted her decayed townswomen—at as low a rent as was compatible with prudence—to shelter themselves under her roof and as near it as possible. Her house being a profitable warren of American art-students, tempered by native journalists and decadent poets, she could, moreover, afford to let the old ladies off coffee and candles. They were at liberty to prepare their own dejeuner in winter or to buy it outside in summer; they could burn their own candles or sit in the dark, as the heart in them pleased; ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... rest, and with one hand on the back of her chair, the other resting on the piano, he bent over her, eyes wandering from the gold of her hair to the parting of her lips as she sang. It was just such a song as he had asked for; filled with the abandoned sentimentalism of decadent passion— ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... re-established, and art production became again abundant among the subject population, though of inferior quality. The Cnossian palace was re-occupied in its northern part by chieftains WHO have left numerous rich graves; and general commercial intercourse must have been resumed, for the uniformity of the decadent Aegean products and their wide distribution become more marked ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room was really too pronounced for Gilbert's fastidious and scholarly eloquence; he lost vitality in it, and dwindled to the pale ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... to my supper. I had found the mundane things of Greece disappointing enough, but my sorrow over Hippopopolis's expert testimony as to the shortcoming of the gods was overwhelming. It was to be expected that the country would fall into a decadent state sooner or later, but that the Olympians themselves were not all that they were cracked up to be by the mythologies had never suggested itself to me. As a result of my courier's words, I lapsed into a moody silence, which by eight o'clock developed into ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... on the virtues of Ibsen, Strindberg, Knut Hamsen, Hauptmann, and a number of others, mostly names I did not recollect ever having heard before, and she often used the word "decadent," which she pronounced in the French way and which I did not then understand. Now and then she would quote some critic, or some remark heard from a friend or from her father, and once she dwelt on an argument of her oldest brother, who seemed to be well versed in Russian literature ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Exile, it is difficult to see how even the art with which the tragedy of Queen Frederique's life is unfolded or the growing power of characterization displayed in her, in the loyal Merault, in the facile, decadent Christian, can make up for the lack of broadly human appeal in the general subject-matter of a book which was so sympathetically written as to appeal alike to Legitimists and to Republicans. Good as Kings ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... have been accompanied with too much appeal to the feelings and unhealthy emotional excitement; but some vigorous movement was absolutely necessary to quicken the spiritual life of a decadent age. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger upon flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... insolence, and by the glamour of his name. The annals of mediaeval Italy were stained with blood and tears because of the Tor di Rocca, and their loves that ended always in cruelty and horror, and Filippo had all the instincts of his decadent race. In love he was pitiless; no impulses of tenderness or of chivalry restrained him, and his methods were primeval and violent. Probably the Rape of the Sabines was his ideal of courtship, but the subsequent domesticity, the settling down of the Romans with their stolen wives, would have been ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... Caxas," he remarked, "was one of the decadent rulers of ancient Peru. At the Conquest by the Spaniards, Inca Atahuallpa was murdered by Pizarro, as you probably know. Inca Toparca succeeded him as a puppet king. He died also, and it was suspected that he was slain by a native chief called Challcuchima. Then ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... desolation, poverty and misery. Decadent men become dry and pedantic. Oppression and tyranny without engender pedagogism within. Thus the art of the Rococo became in the eighteenth century poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... superior weapons, conquered and indeed destroyed it. And second, that even in the gorgeous picture given by the Homeric poems of the period with which they deal, there is a constant tendency to regard that period as being only the decadent and inferior heir of a civilization which had preceded it. Nothing is plainer in Homer than the suggestion that the men of the age before the Trojan Wars were greater, stronger, wiser, better in every respect than even the heroes who fought on 'the ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... The consequence was that, while she herself sat erect in fine scorn of the backs of her straight-backed Sheratons, her drawing-room was furnished with an abundance of easy chairs and lounges, and arranged with cosey nooks and corners calculated to gratify the luxurious tastes and lazy manners of a decadent generation. Her shrewd wit was further discovered in the care she took to assemble to her evening parties the prettiest, brightest, wickedest of the young girls in the wide circle of her friends. As young Robert Kidd put it with more vigour than grace, "There were no ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... West it was Spinoza to whom he gave the place of highest honour. Regarding the Great Peace as the ultimate object of human attainment, he held that Spinoza alone had found a clear path to the goal; since then European thought had been continually decadent. ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... the guests there was a dance of nuptial unveiling and a bout between half-a-dozen Turkish boxers. But it was a decadent and blaze company, and something more piquant was needed for their titillation. This was supplied in the shape of an original dance by the fifteen-year-old Joseph, whom my guide describes as "graceful, wild and pungent." He was introduced in a recumbent posture, and asleep, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... all events, will deny that England stands to-day otherwise than she stood a hundred and thirty-two years ago, when George was born. To-day we are living a decadent life. All the while that we are prating of progress, we are really so deteriorate! There is nothing but feebleness in us. Our youths, who spend their days in trying to build up their constitutions by ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... may be said with respect to the churches. In every city there are several, and people can usually go to the church of their choice. In many parts of the country the church is decadent, and in some places it is becoming extinct. Even the automobile contributes its influence against the country church as a rural institution, and in favor of the city; for people who are sufficiently well-to-do often like ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... antiquities not more interesting, in the possession of others, and who would fain transport Shakespeare's house bodily to American soil. The moat surrounding the Walled City is already being filled up, but posterity will be grateful for the preservation of those ancient bulwarks—landmarks of a decadent but once glorious civilization. Most of the Spanish feast-days have been abolished, including the St. Andrew's day (vide Li-ma-hong, p. 50), and the following have been ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... back-garden door. But there is no merit in that! It is not a thing to be complacent about; still less does it justify you in saying to the simple person who prefers the direct course that the world is getting lazy and decadent and is always trying to save itself trouble. The point is to have lived, not to have been merely occupied. I remember once, when I was an undergraduate, staying at a place in Scotland for a summer holiday. There were all sorts of ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Monreale, or by coloured glass in the northern cathedrals of the pointed style. Many of these frescoes date from years before the birth of Giotto. Giunta the Pisan, Gaddo Gaddi, and Cimabue, are supposed to have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a dying art. In their school Giotto laboured, and modern painting arose with the movement of new life beneath his brush. Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of Christ's suffering, and in his later manhood ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... was beyond measure fortunate in the possession of an absolutely ideal home. "'Home! Sweet Home!' Yes. That is the song that goes straight to the heart of every English man and woman. For forty years we never asked Madame Adelina Patti to sing anything else. The unhappy, decadent, Latin races have not even a word in their language by which to express it, poor things! Home is the secret of our honest, British, Protestant virtues. It is the only nursery of our Anglo-Saxon citizenship. Back to it our far-flung children turn, with all their memories aflame. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... on German music is hardly complimentary to Chopin: "Wagner is a thorough-going decadent, an off-shoot, an epigonus, not a progonus. His cheeks are hollow and pale—but the Germans have the full red cheeks. Equally decadent is Liszt. Liszt is a Hungarian and the Hungarians are confessedly a completely disorganized, self-outlived, dying people. No ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the rites, and as there is little probability that opportunity will be afforded him to participate in more than two or three ceremonies in a year, his instruction is necessarily slow. The medicine-men recognize the fact that their ritual has been decadent for some time, and they regard it as foreordained that when all the ceremonies are forgotten the ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... any blessing but that of peace. Under these circumstances poetry could not thrive; and in truth the eighteenth century in Spain is an age devoted more to the discussion of the principles of literature than to the production of it. At first the decadent remnants of page xxvii the siglo de oro still survived, but later the French taste, following the principles formulated by Boileau, prevailed almost entirely. The history of Spanish poetry in the eighteenth century is a history of the struggle between these two forces and ends in the ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... 416). But the passage before us cannot be construed as an assertion that Ireland was in like case; for in Sec. 12 mention is made of the "monks" of Bangor in the time of Congall. St. Bernard (or Malachy, if the words are really his) must be taken to mean simply that the so-called monks of the decadent contemporary Church of Ireland were not monks in the true sense of the word. (Cp. Lett. iii. Sec. 2). There is nothing to be said for the explanation suggested by Lanigan (iv. 114) that the "nations" are nations other than the Irish, who had ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... was the only modern language worth reading he used to say—a few modern German etchings, a low Turkish divan, and some Egyptian antiquities, made up the furniture of his two sitting-rooms. Above all things he despised Greek art; it was, he said decadent. The Egyptians and the Germans were, in his opinion, the only people who knew anything about the plastic arts, whereas the only music he could endure was that of the modern French School. Over his chimney-piece there was a large German landscape in oils, called "Im Walde"; it represented ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... upon her. Rome is determined to assert to the end that she was not, and cannot be, vanquished. In the age of the Reformation, she admits, she suffered some losses, but she claims that she is fast retrieving these, while Protestantism is decadent and decaying. No opposition to her can hope ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... extent there has been a sense, on the part of the enemies of Germany, of fighting to root out a dangerous and rank growth. Germany, seeing in her own civilization only the appearance of modernism, has been inclined to regard all other civilizations as decadent. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... the cab rolled swiftly southwards through the mysterious dark avenues of Hyde Park, Leonora had the sensation of being really alone with him in the very heart of that luxurious, voluptuous, and decadent civilisation for which she had always yearned, and in which she was now to participate. The feeling of the beauty of the world, and of its catholicity and many-sidedness, returned to her. She gave play to her instincts. And, revelling in the self-confidence and the masterful ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... fate hold in store? Among those hills, the outline of which I could now but faintly see, were the lakes and salmon rivers in the heart of the great forests which make our Canadian wild life so fascinating. We were being torn from that life and sent headlong into the seething militarism of a decadent European feudalism. I was leaning on the rail looking at the track of moonlight, when a young lad came up to me and said, "Excuse me, Sir, but may I talk to you for a while? It is such a weird sight that it has got on my nerves." He was a young boy of ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... declared. "You say that I have no nerves; that is because I do not allow myself to suffer. If I had gone on living with Wenham, it would have driven me mad. His habits, his manner of life, everything disgusted me. Until I came to see so much of him, I never understood what the term 'decadent' really can mean. The very touch of him grew to be hateful. No woman could live with such a man. By the way, he signed ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... excessively—out of a kind of excitement and desoeuvrement—his strong, grizzled hair bristling about his head, his black eyes staring and bloodshot, and that wild gypsyish look of his youth more noticeable than ever in these surroundings of what promised soon to be a decadent ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sincere. Much misunderstanding has arisen by judging such primitive people by the standards of our present day civilization. Sex worship, while it held sway was probably quite as seriously entertained as many other beliefs; it only became degraded during a decadent age, when civilization had advanced beyond such simple conceptions of a deity, but had ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Babylonians and with less definiteness through the people of the Nile was never entirely lost. Such a sad waste was out of accord with the obvious principles of divine economy. As the icy chill of ceremonialism seized decadent Babylonia and Egypt, there emerged from the steppes south and east of Palestine a virile, ambitious group of nomads, who not only fell heir to that which was best in the revelation of the past, but also quickly took their place as the real spiritual leaders of ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... the conversation of the Blaylocks) that the Springs was decadent. A third of the population had moved away. Business—and the Colonel was an authority on business—had dwindled to nothing. After carefully studying the field of opportunities open to capital he had sold his little property there for eight hundred dollars and invested it in ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... churches. The central belfry, albeit of a base, though pretentious, rococo design, follows no accepted style, but adds imposingly to the general outline. (Its height is over three hundred feet.) In this tower, as in the window tracery, the fleur-de-lys, always a sign of the decadent in Gothic style, is to be seen. The western towers, with their spires, follow the truest pyramidal form, and, though carrying both pointed and round-arched openings, are in every way representative of the best work of their period. The northwesterly tower has an ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... about the situation; he accused the young because they had remained silent and accepted this last indignity without a protest. God help us, what kind of a youth was that? Was our youth, then, entirely decadent? ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... to fifty years of age. Iron-gray mustache. Slightly stout. A good liver, much given to Scotch and soda, with a weak heart. Is liable to collapse any time. If anything, slightly lazy or lethargic in his emotional life. One of the "owned" senators representing a decadent New England state, himself master of the state political machine. Also, he is nobody's fool. He possesses the brain and strength of character to play his part. His most distinctive feature is his ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... Armstrong bit out. "It seems to be a practice that can crop up in any decadent society. Remember Hitler reviving it among the German universities? Well, it's all the rage now among the officers of the Sov world. Limited, however, to Party members, the lowly proletariat are ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... necessary that the leaders in any form of creative action should be men of highly developed intellect, fine sensibility, wide and penetrating vision, nobility of instinct, passion for righteousness, and a consciousness of the eternal force of charity, honour, and service. During the imperial or decadent stages, courage, dynamic force, the passion for adventure, unscrupulousness in the matter of method, took the place of the qualities that marked the earlier periods. In the first instance the result was the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... slaves, criminals, and lunatics. They burrowed in the Catacombs, they fastened themselves upon a decaying and magnificent civilization like the parasites they were. A series of political catastrophes, a popular uprising against the rotten emperors of decadent Rome, and the wide growth of the socialist idea—these things and an unscrupulous man, Constantine the Great, put the Christians firmly in the saddle. And soon came cataracts of blood. If the tales of the imperial persecutions ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... painter. The Sleeping Woman, the First Step, the Terrace, and the decorative Dance panels reveal Renoir as an intimiste and as an admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of grasping nature and of ingenuity—strangers to all decadent complexity—have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of dazzling variety and exquisite ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... the influence of church, patriotism, and press when one sees how the housewife has disregarded these influences. For all the religions preach that race suicide is a sin, all the statesmen point out that only decadent nations restrict families, and all or nearly all the press thunder against it. It is even against the law for a physician or other person to instruct in the methods of birth restriction, and yet—the birth rate steadily drops. An immigrant ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... the best use of a history is probably to stimulate readers to think for themselves about the events portrayed; and if I have succeeded in doing that, I shall be satisfied. The history of the United States does mean something: what is it? Are we a decadent fruit that is rotten before it is ripe? or are we the bud of the mightiest tree of time? The materials for forming your judgment are here; form it according as your faith and hope ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... amongst Christians? How did it fare with the poor all over Europe in the centuries when Christianity was at the zenith of its power? How is it we have twelve millions of Christians on the verge of starvation in England to-day, with a Church rolling in wealth and an aristocracy decadent from luxury and self-indulgence? How is it that the gulf betwixt rich and poor in such Christian capitals as New York, London, and Paris is so wide ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spain was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... in the narrative of John (1:40-51), who tells us how Andrew won Peter and Philip won Nathanael by personal appeals to follow Christ. If all the followers of Christ in all the churches would each win one soul for Christ every year there would be no more complaints about decadent churches. ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... the grimness of his manner, suggested an abnormal condition. Burlingame was not a brave man physically. He had never lived the outdoor life, though he had lived so much among outdoor people. He was that rare thing in a new land, a decadent, a connoisseur in vice, a lover of opiates and of liquor. He was young enough yet not to be incapacitated by it. His face and hands were white and a little flabby, and he wore his hair rather long, which, it is said, accounts for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Lettish Sun-songs and Sun-myths of the peasants we see, he says, a myth-world 'in process of becoming,' in an early state of development, as in the Veda (p. 325). But, we may reply, in the Veda, myths are already full-grown, or even decadent. Already there are unbelievers in the myths. Thus we would say, in the Veda we have (1) myths of nature, formed in the remote past, and (2) poetical phrases about heavenly phenomena, which resemble the nature-poetry of the Letts, but which do not become full-grown ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... one criterion for membership in the Brotherhood—membership in the human race. No matter how decadent or primitive a population might be, if it was human it was automatically eligible for Brotherhood—a free and equal partner in the society ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Decadent and grown effeminate though Rome was, there was no patrician who had not received some training in the use of arms. Varronius took the spear at once, his white hands closing on the shaft with military firmness. But his white face gave the lie to the ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy |
