#decadence

I am the last reflection of the hero. Laurels are out of fashion, so my decadence is showered with champagne. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #heroes #humor #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

Bully the jade, and she will love you. ("The Accursed Cordonnier") ↗

— Bernard Capes

#decadence #decadent #decadents #love

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

— Théophile Gautier

#orgy #vampire #age

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

— Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly

#death #decadence #dissolution #life #death

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. ↗

— Remy de Gourmont

#life #mankind #courage

The habit is now confirmed in me of spending the greater part of the day in sleep, while by night I wander far and wide through the city under the sedative influence of a tincture which has become necessary to my life ↗

— M.P. Shiel

#decadent #drugs #night #sleep #life

The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations. ↗

— Jean Lorrain

#cowardice #decadence #government #law #nature

Poverty fled, she who gives birth to virile men. ↗

— Marcus Annaeus Lucanus

#manliness #poverty #upbringing #men

(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions. ↗

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

#decadence #decadent #sickness #nature