#degeneration

Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual, like a hide-bound chrysalis, should develop secret and self-contained, was perished in his case, as it were, to a semi-opaque suit, through which his soul gazed dimly and fearfully on its monstrous arbitrary surroundings. Not the mantle of the poet, philosopher, or artist fallen upon such, can still its shiverings, or give the comfort that Nature denies. Yet he was a little bit of each - poet, philosopher, and artist; a nerveless and self-deprecatory stalker of ideals, in the pursuit of which he would wear patent leather shoes and all the apologetic graces. The grandson of a 'three-bottle' J.P., who had upheld the dignity of the State constitution while abusing his own in the best spirit of squirearchy; the son of a petulant dyspeptic, who alternated seizures of long moroseness with fits of abject moral helplessnes, Amos found his inheritance in the reversion of a dissipated constitution, and an imagination as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Before he was thirty he was a neurasthenic so practised, as to have learned a sense of luxury in the very consciousness of his own suffering. It was a negative evolution from the instinct of self-protection - self-protection, as designed in this case, against the attacks of the unspeakable. ("The Accursed Cordonnier") ↗

— Bernard Capes

#decadent #degenerate #degeneration #neurasthenic #design

Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#criminals #degeneration #enterprise #originality #pencils

I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty. ↗

— William Ralph Inge

#best #best time #conscience #degeneration #escape

It is claimed, but with what truth we cannot say, that there is a well-defined propaganda among the aliens of colour to bring about the degeneration of the white race. ↗

— Emily Murphy

#among #bring #cannot #claimed #colour

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. ↗

— Georges Clemenceau

#barbarism #civilization #degeneration #directly #gone

I've got what my ma had, macular degeneration, which you get when you get old. ↗

— Judi Dench

#get #got #had #i #ma

It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#baby #born #complete #contend #degeneration

If you look back today over the last 25 years, it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general; in particular in the field of human intelligence. ↗

— Paul Bremer

#community #degeneration #fact #field #general

It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached. ↗

— Imre Lakatos

#been #before #degeneration #everybody #exhausted

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#being #degeneration #fatty #his #man