"Decadence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have their successive cycles of glory and decadence; is not the present theosophical movement the renaissance of the Neoplatonic movement which brought the light to Greece and Egypt fifteen hundred years ago? In 1875 H. P. Blavatsky restored it to life, whilst its previous birth look place in ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... ascribes the political decadence of Spain almost wholly to the destruction of the forest. "Spain," observes he, "seemed destined by her position to hold dominion over the world, and this in fact she once possessed. But she has lost ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... chateau, to which de Sigognac had been perfectly accustomed before he quitted it, and taken as a matter of course, now struck him forcibly, and increased his dejection. He saw in it the sad and inevitable decadence of his race, and said to himself, "If these ancient walls had any pity for the last forlorn remnant of the family they have sheltered for centuries, they would fall in and bury me ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... unfortunately, a certain law of decadence seems to have prevailed, because of which every nation, after acquiring great power, has in turn succumbed to the enervating effects which seem inseparable from it, and become the victim of some newer nation ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... were not slow in perceiving the weakness and decadence of the Portuguese power in Asia. They felt with how much ease a clever and prudent nation might in a short time become possessed of the whole commerce of the extreme East. After a considerable number of private expeditions and voyages of reconnaissance they ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... amounted to more than 3000. Confucius removed those which were only repetitions of others, and selected those which would be serviceable for the inculcation of propriety and righteousness. Ascending as high as Hsieh and Hu-k, and descending through the prosperous eras of Yin and Ku to the times of decadence under kings Y and L, he selected in all 305 pieces, which he' sang over to his lute, to bring them into accordance with the musical style of the Sho, the W, the Y, ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... Le Cafe, ou l'Ecossaise. Goldoni was a lover of coffee, a regular frequenter of the coffee houses of his time, from which he drew much in the way of inspiration. Pietro Longhi, called the Venetian Hogarth, in one of his pictures presenting life and manners in Venice during the years of her decadence, shows Goldoni as a visitor in a cafe of the period, with a female mendicant soliciting alms. It is in the collection ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Cologne in 1308, emphasised, sharply enough, but in less drastic fashion, the reaction against the teaching of Hales and Aquinas, by accepting a dualism between reason and authority that broke away from the Thomist tradition of the thirteenth century and prepared the way for the scholastic decadence of the fourteenth. After France, England took a leading part in all these movements; and even in France English scholars had a large share in making that land the special home of the Studium, as Italy was of the Sacerdotium and Germany ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... the prettiest. Anne tried to behave as if all her happiness depended on a pattern, and ended by choosing the one that Maisie liked best. And the furniture went where Maisie thought it should go, because Anne was too tired to care. Besides, she was busy on her farm. Old Sutton in his decadence had let most of his arable land run to waste, and Anne's job was to make good soil again ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... paradox to mistake, in the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters: and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray and Cowper—belong wholly to ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... path he might have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently developing—and Amory had considered that he was doing the same. He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of decadence—now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year and a half seemed stale and futile—a petty consummation of himself... and like a sombre background lay that incident of the spring before, that filled half his nights ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Adriatic coast escaped subjection. In the 16th century under Solyman the Magnificent (1520-1566) the Ottoman power attained its greatest height; after the unsuccessful siege of Vienna (1683) it began to decline. The period of decadence was marked in the latter half of the 18th century by the formation of practically independent pashaliks or fiefs, such as those of Scutari under Mahommed of Bushat, Iannina under Ali of Tepelen, and Viden under Pasvan-oglu. The detachment of the outlying portions of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... a catholic taste, is interested in all forms of art; but he finds beauty where it truly exists and does not allow the nightmare of imagination to mislead him. That which is not beautiful from one point of view or another is not art, but decadence. That which is technical to the exclusion of other elements remains technique pure and simple, workmanship—the bare bones of art. A thing is not art simply because it is fantastic. It may be interesting as showing to what degree some imaginations can become diseased, but it is not ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... but in the hunting-field! By your experiments, from age to age, to have discovered variety in diet; to have practised it, to the great advantage of your race, and to end up with uniformity, the cause of decadence; to have known the excellent and to repudiate it for the middling: oh, my Sphex-wasps, it would be stupid if the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... urged that we must fly to the most violent measure the ingenuity of man could devise. Let me remind gentlemen that this has been the history of popular governments everywhere, the reason of their downfall, their decadence, and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... possible superstition. I am always wondering why I have never been taken in by that." He was once sitting at dinner by the celebrated Lady E—— of T——, who was indulging in a long lament over the social decadence of the rising male generation. "When I was a girl," she said, "all the young men in London were at my feet." "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, "were all the young men of your generation chiropodists?" Mr. C. Milnes Gaskell of Thornes ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... upon the oft-repeated apology of the critic for existing at all, and find how complete is his stultification. He brands himself as the necessary blister for the health of the painter, and writes that he may do good to his art. In the same ink he bemoans the decadence about him, and declares that the best work was done when he was not there to help it. No! let there be no critics! they are not a "necessary evil," but an evil quite unnecessary, ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... near crutch that the rider was able to get a fairly firm support for her right leg by jamming it between these two crutches. As the great utility of the leaping head received increasingly wide recognition, the off crutch underwent a gradual process of decadence, because it is of no benefit to a rider who understands the use of a leaping head. Indications of its previous existence may occasionally be seen, especially abroad, in the form of an entirely useless thickening of the off side ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... ignorance of the teaching of the Prophet, but a blind forgetfulness of the evidence of history. The Islam of the earlier centuries evolved and progressed with the nations, and the stimulus it gave to men in the reign of the ancient caliphs is beyond all question. To impute to it the present decadence of the Moslem world is altogether too puerile. The truth is that nations have their day; and to a period of glorious splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and slumber. It is a law of nature. And then one day some danger threatens them, stirs them from their ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... relative duties, were extinguished. Whole families were destroyed; and the empire was a scene of anarchy and wild contention. He, who felt himself capable of the most atrocious deeds, declared himself a BLUE, and the GREENS were massacred with impunity. Montesquieu, Grandeur et Decadence des ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... dissipation and excess, and ever hope to make up their losses by rigid surveillance in later years." "The sins of youth are expiated in age," is a proverb which daily examples illustrate. In proportion as puberty is precocious, will decadence be premature; the excesses of middle life draw heavily on the fortune of later years. "The mill of the gods grinds slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine," and though nature may be a tardy creditor, she is found at last to be an ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... compensation for the losses he had sustained. He could still hold communion with nature and with his own mind, and could give to the national cause the service of a bold heart and a finely-cultivated intellect. Subsequent to the decadence of the '48 movement he wrote a good deal in prose and verse, and contributed gratuitously to various national publications. His intimate acquaintance with the character and habits of the peasantry gave a great charm to his stories ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... white and he could see black, but he could not see grey, and never tried to paint it. He does not allow Philip II even his redeeming virtues of indefatigable industry and unceasing devotion to duty, while in his Rome of the decadence would assuredly be found scarce five good men. His vision is curiously limited to the darker side of history; he hears humanity uttering in all ages a cry of suffering, and but rarely a shout of laughter. He sees the oppression of the tyrant more vividly than the ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... rite is merely the selection of nominal fathers for their children.[315] Throughout the careful study which we now possess, thanks to Dr. Rivers, of this people, there is the dominant note of dairy economy superimposing itself upon all else, and even religion seems to be in a state of decadence.[316] I do not know that anywhere else could be found a stronger example of the results of extreme specialisation upon the social and mental condition of a people. As a rule such specialisation does not extend ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... certain success, and have then passed entirely out of existence. Why? And are we destined to extinction in the same way? We know that the cause of the decline and ultimate extinction of all past civilizations was due primarily to the moral decadence of their people. Disease and vice gradually sapped their vitality, and their continuance was impossible. [xx] It would seem to be the destiny of a race to achieve material prosperity at the expense of its morality. When conditions render possible the fulfilment of every human desire, the race ...
— 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.
... his old wife, of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. "Brother," said Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a teakettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... without splutter or noise of any kind. The art of power in this sort is no doubt learned in hours of reflection, by those who are not born with it. What rebuke of aimless excitement there is to be got out of a little reflection, when we have been inveighing against the corruption and decadence of our own days, if only we have provided ourselves with a little knowledge of the past wherewith to balance our thought! As bad times as these, or any we shall see, have been reformed, but not by protests. They have ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... became an independent country, and King Leopold I. ascended the throne, Ostend and Nieuport were the only towns upon the coast which were of any size; but Ostend was then a small fortified place, with a harbour wholly unsuited for modern commerce, and Nieuport, in a state of decadence, though it possessed a harbour, was a place of no importance. To-day the whole coast is studded with busy watering-places, about twenty of them, most of which have come into existence within the last fifteen years, with ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... of Locke, of Addison, and of Steele—the principles of the Bill of Rights and of "the Glorious Revolution of 1688";—the Whiggism which had its origin in the party of Cromwell and of the Independents, of John Milton and of Richard Baxter, the party which even in its decadence flowered in England in Chatham and William Pitt, and in America in Washington, John Adams, and the founders of the Republic. Whig principles to me mean that the will of the majority of the nation as a whole must prevail, and not the will of any section, even if it is a large section and does manual ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... a great deal of lamentation lately among old breeders and exhibitors about the decadence of the breed and the loss of the true old type possessed by these dogs. But, despite all they can say to the contrary, the Clumber is now in a more flourishing state than it ever has been; and although perhaps we have not now, nor have had for the last decade, a John o' Gaunt or a Tower, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... been spoken of as "the king's washtubs." Mele inoa were not crown-jewels [Page 117] to be passed from one incumbent of the throne to another. The practice of appropriating the mele inoa composed in honor of another king and of another line was one that grew up with the decadence of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... any kind of pessimism, nor were they greatly interested in the campaign as a military affair. All their interest was in their work. They were a wonderful stimulus. Where a man unwittingly tended to let things slide they exhorted and energised. In details, they did not seem to show that gradual decadence that creeps imperceptibly over men when isolated and overworked. It is perhaps so subtle that it takes a woman to detect it. Women may be theoretically unscientific, but they are essential to the maintenance ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... California gold wave reached its zenith in 1853. What more natural than that the army of miners, with the decadence of the California fields, should search out ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... a malignant influence, and every one of the planets threatening thee with disgrace, according as they stand seated towards one another, in relation to the horned signs of Aries, Taurus, and Capricorn. In the fourth house I find Jupiter in a decadence, as also in a tetragonal aspect to Saturn, associated with Mercury. Thou wilt be soundly peppered, my good, honest fellow, I warrant thee. I will be? answered Panurge. A plague rot thee, thou old fool and doting sot, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... It flourished enormously, and extended itself to all the matter of history and legend, to King Arthur, Theseus, Alexander, ancient heroes and warriors who were brought alive again in the likeness of knights and emperors. Its triumph was so complete, that its decadence followed swiftly. Like the creatures that live in the blood of man, literary forms and species commonly die of their own excess. Romances were multiplied, and imitated; professional poets, not content with marvels ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... or little butterflies eternally the same. The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant, eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in the Mayflower, or at a period yet more remote, and the acme of the prosperity and social distinction of the name was coincident with the second administration of President Washington. Since that time its decadence had been steady; at first slow, but later with the accelerating motion common to falling bodies, until nothing remained of the family revenues, little but a tradition of the family greatness, and none of the race but this frostbitten old lady, ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... "lake party" had a distinct social significance, and the word "picnic," which came later to be used to describe the same thing, meant to the elder inhabitants an affair that had quite lost the flavor of the older custom, and the use of the word was regarded as one of the signs of social decadence. ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... requiring always submission to severe law, is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress. There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation either torpid, weak, or in decadence. Their drama may gain in grace and wit; but their sculpture, in days of decline, is ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... powers of observation completely misleading, the inward condition of the class in question is this. However calm the outer surface of their lives may seem, under the surface there is a continual discord; and also, though they alone may perceive it, a continued decadence. In various degrees they all yield to temptation; all men in the vigour of their manhood do; and conscience still fills them with its old monitions and reproaches. But it cannot enforce obedience. They feel it to be the truth, but at the same time they know it ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... most perfect illustration; the Renaissance thus putting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliest phases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... distinctive dress worn by students and officers of a College or University, and also by officials of a {128} Court of Justice. It is not an ecclesiastical garment, although it was customary during a time of great spiritual decadence in the Church for the gown with bands to be worn during the preaching of the sermon in the service. This, however, has long since been given up; the ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought. Certainly no one ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... a grand thing to read a good book—it is a grander thing to live a good life—and in the living of such life is generated the power that defies age and its decadence." ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... intersected by those still but deep-flowing rivers and canals, scenes so conducive to mental exercise—the Dutch patriot mourning over the transition of former national prestige to present condition of decadence presaging complete national submersion, but at the same time courageously employing his fertile brain in devising far-reaching projects of remedy over distant perspectives so as to stem that tide of decadence and declension and to erect a firm barrier against that menace—to gain (by ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... than ever. I feel like a good-for-nothing, a cow, damned, antique, deliquescent, in short calm and moderate, which is the last term in decadence. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... estimate of the limitations of submarines. He anticipated Sir Percy Scott by a year in his doubts of the decisive value of great battleships (see "An Englishman Looks at the World"); and he was sound in denying the decadence of France; in doubting (before the Russo-Japanese struggle) the greatness of the power of Russia, which was still in those days a British bogey; in making Belgium the battle-ground in a coming struggle between the mid-European Powers and the rest of Europe; and (he believes) ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... the halls of our modern universities, should we be astonished to see outright infidelity, political socialism, religious anarchy, stalk the length and breadth of the land? "Impurity, obscenity, moral corruption in many forms, with the ever consequent cynicism and pessimism, forerunners of moral decadence, destruction of the original, creative, shaping, joyous, confident energies of society, come daily more boldly to the front of the stage and defy criticism or mock at the archaic sanctions of yesterday. One does not need to peruse the great modern historians ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... savagism into barbarism, seems to have at that stage exhausted its energies. This is but an illustration of the fact that a race, like an individual, has a period of growth, a maturity of healthful powers, and an old age of slow decadence. After thus dispersing over the world, carrying with them the culture of the Neolithic Age, they seem to have halted in their progress. It remained for a new people, starting, perhaps, from the same state of culture, but with new energies, to discover and ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... it fails to imitate, we call it trash. But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy is the illumination of life. Illumination of life, through a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane, and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine to be nature,—nature, often, as seen through a diseased ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... or African race, since the decadence and destruction of the cities of North Africa and the Nile Delta and the loss of prestige of the peoples who held sway in them, has been shrouded and obscured, and hence gratuitous arguments are made in regard to the savagery ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... which in general produces war. War may have its abnormalities, if we may speak of a worse in that which is already bad enough. War may satisfy the desperate mind; it may, on occasion, be a narcotic to cover up worse pain, or an evidence of decadence; or even be what those who think of it as a reversion believe. But all these aspects of war, if our view be sound, are the eccentricities rather than the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... musician and philosopher. Compared with such poems as Andrea del Sarto, there is little realisable detail in the course of the calm argument or statement, but I scarcely see how the temper of the time, among its choicest spirits (the time of classic decadence, of barren culture, of fruitless philosophy) could well have been more finely shadowed forth. The quality of the versification, unique here as in every one of the five great poems, is perfectly adapted to the subject. The slow ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... to tread with feathery feet, and the years grow self-asserting, italicize themselves in passing; and across the dial of woman's beauty the shadow of decadence falls aslant. But although Mrs. Orme had offered sacrifice to that inexorable Terminus, who dwells at the last border line of youth, the ripeness and glow of her extraordinary loveliness showed as yet no hint ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the "Various Epistles". It must be regarded as a misfortune for Theodoric that his maxims of statesmanship, which were assuredly full of manly sense and vigour, should have reached us only in such a shape, diluted with the platitudes and false rhetoric of a scholar of the decadence. Still, even through all these disguises, it is easy to discern the genuine patriotism both of the great King and of his minister, their earnest desire that right, not might, should determine every case that came before ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... sounded on the stage, and the unhappy singer, bereft of romance, his career finished, decadence and old age staring him in the face, went to answer the call. But suddenly his face changed; a brightness, an alertness came into it and even, mysteriously, into all his body. There was a woman at the other end of the wire, and she was young and ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... the Church as the only ark of salvation. Yet there is rarely to be found in the Church annals an excommunication on the ground of chauvinism or brutal egoism. No one of the world conquerors—neither Napoleon nor Kaiser William—have been excommunicated by the Church. It signifies an extreme decadence of the Church. And this decadence penetrates and dominates our own time. Speaking on the reunion of the Churches the peoples of the East are anxious to know—not whether the Church of the West has preserved the unmixed Christian spirit in its integrity, but whether ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... small, hard and unsympathetic. Very few young men or young women of strength and feeling fail to pass through a period of Pessimism. With some it is merely an affectation caught from the cheap literature of decadence. It then may find expression in imitation, as a few years ago the sad-hearted youth turned down his collar in sympathy with the "conspicuous loneliness" that took the starch out of the collar of Byron. "The youth," says Zangwill, "says ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... There are many points of view from which to study the conditions existing at the close of this period. But for our purpose it will probably suffice to consider (1) some signs of decadence or defects; (2) some hopeful signs. The facts touching these matters are to be gathered not only from secular history but from the life and work of Jesus as they are seen at work either for or against the progress of his work. (1) Unpropitious conditions. Among ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... world's literature. Nina Almayer shows the atavistic "pull" of the soil and opposes finesse to force, while Alice Jacobus in 'Twixt Land and Sea (A Smile of Fortune) is half-way on the road back to barbarism. But Nina will be happy with her chief. In depicting the slow decadence of character in mixed races and the naive stammerings at the birth of their ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... correspondence into the motor, and he had the decency to ask whether he had been unpolished over-night. I replied that I waited an apology. This he made excuse for renewed arguments, and used wayside shows as illustrations of the decadence of England. ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... that kind of person find so magnifique in Raphael's later work—mostly painted by his pupils and assistants, by the way. It is Winckelmann, isn't it, who says that when you come to the age of expression in Greek art you have come to the age of decadence? I don't remember how or where it is said, but of course it is true—can't be otherwise in the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... was shrivelled, her form had lost the round symmetry of earlier years, and was angular and stiff; yet how cheerful and lively she was! She had gone far down-hill physically; but either she did not feel her decadence, or she had grown quite reconciled to it. Her daughter, a blooming matron, was there, happy, wealthy, good; yet not apparently a whit more reconciled to life than the aged grandame. It was pleasing, and yet it was sad, to see how well we can make up our mind to what is inevitable. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... will. He is chafing at his position as a viceroy, not an absolute sovereign. He is becoming tyrannical, careless of his subjects' lives, intolerant of opposition, remonstrance, or advice. The tragedy of his decadence is summed up in Samuel's stern word: 'Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee from ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was much the same as now; twenty years from now the garish newness will be worn off and it will return to its appearance of gloomy decadence. ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... himself under the painful necessity of leaving my service. 'Heavens! Monsieur Rostain to leave my service! And where do you expect to go?' 'To Paris.' 'What! to Paris! But you had shaken upon the great Babylon the dust of your sandals! The decadence of taste, the increasing development of the romantic cuisine! Such are your own words, Rostain!' He replied: 'Doubtless, Monsieur le Marquis; but provincial life has bitter trials which I had not ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... free-trade, the removal of twenty millions of taxation, a cheap press, and an education bill, Mr. Gladstone thus restored himself to the confidence of his constituents, but the ministry did not wholly regain the popularity they once enjoyed. The Gladstone period had passed its zenith and its decadence had already begun. ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... use of hoping for a decadence of the craze for historical romances so long as the public is fed on books like this? Such a story has zest for the most jaded palate; nay, it can hold the interest even of a book reviewer. From the first ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... opinion became sharply divided. The middle-class German-Americans naturally espoused with some vehemence the justice of the Fatherland's cause. German intellectuals of influence, such as Hugo Muensterberg, inveighed against the hypocrisy and the decadence of the Entente powers. Many Americans who had lived or had been educated in Germany, some professors who had been brought into contact with the Kaiser explained the "essentially defensive character" of Germany's struggle against the threatening Slav. Certain of the politically active Irish ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... logic, ineffective rhetoric, and undignified petulance, furnishes a pitiful proof of the intellectual and moral decadence of a once great name;" i.e., The same oration seen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... of authors. His frequent orations for the literary societies of Brown University and the University of Michigan, and other occasions, have been marked by scholarly finish and have always been received with approval. During the existence of the Knickerbocker Magazine, before its decadence, he contributed to its pages a series of valuable articles on "Butler's Horae Juridical," and ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... the decadence of religion, has a bearing upon the number of suicides. The fear of "God," of judgment, of eternal pain will stay the hand, and people so believing will suffer here until relieved by natural death. A belief in the eternal agony beyond the grave will cause such believers to ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Gordon, having counted; and Mr. Curtenty gazed at him in reproach, for that he, a Town Councillor, had thus mathematically demonstrated the commercial decadence of Bursley. ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the other side of the low fence, looking at his wheat. The hare, busy as he was and seeming to see nothing, had crossed his 'wind.' Hilary came to me, and we walked together along the waggon-track, repassing the wheat. He was full about it: he was always grieving over the decadence of the wheat crop. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... upon the wheel of history. It first appeared in the West, under the name anti-Semitism, among the dregs of European society. But in its earliest abode it was and is still met with an abrupt rebuff on the part of the most intelligent circles, those whom even the present age of decadence has not succeeded in robbing of belief in lofty moral ideals. Anti-Semitism in the West is in anima vili. Its cult is confined to a certain party, which enjoys a rather scandalous reputation. But there are countries in which this power of darkness, in the coarser ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... who oppose the educational solution that inferior races are unassimilable in their nature to the higher civilization. Proof is sought for in the alleged decadence or disappearance of the Turanian people of Europe, the natives of South America, and the West India Islands. But what is this civilization that is so fatal in its operation? What do we mean by the term? ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... absently at Benjamin Constant's blue ceiling, meretricious and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of Paris, and my eyes moistened because the world is so ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... urinals were thicker than the lamp-posts, I concluded it must be a national trait; and at once abandoned the theory that had begun to take possession of my mind, namely, that diabetes was no doubt the cause of the decadence of France. Yet I suspect it is no more a peculiarity of French manners than of European manners generally, and in its light I relished immensely the history of a well-known statue which stands in a public square in one of the German ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... as well. The idealist, if he be broadminded, and not merely sentimental, is indeed likely to be the practical man. And the type of mind that is made manifest to us by these great non-Aryan languages and their forms, is the former. Of course idealism in its decadence becomes negative, inactive, self-consuming and no longer creative. But in its bloom the direct vision may be even more active, more practical, than are the ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... to be remembered is that these German tribes saved Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out of it ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the Charity Commissioners for an amendment of the Scheme. They were unwilling to take any hand in it on the mere motion of the Master, and their refusal led to much recrimination. Men, anonymous and otherwise, wrote to the Newspapers commenting on the decadence of the School in efficiency and numbers, and the subject became well-worn. In the midst of it Mr. Blakiston received generous and unexpected support. Mr James Foster, a City of London Merchant, who had been educated at Giggleswick and had property in the neighbourhood, heard of the dissension ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... may keep house. How shall it be managed so as to be in harmony with present-day demands? Certainly not by ignoring the difficulties. Progress in any direction does not come through wringing of hands and deploring the decadence of the present generation. President Roosevelt's advice is to bring up boys and girls to overcome obstacles, not to ignore them. Let the educated, intelligent young people join in devising a way to surmount this obstacle as ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... peculiar theory to account for the decadence and ruin of countries. My reading of the world's history seems to teach me that when a strong people take possession of a fertile land, they reduce it to cultivation, thrive upon its bountifulness, multiply into ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... consequence, however, of the wasting of Soma, the deciduous herbs failed to grow. Their juices dried up and they became tasteless, and all of them became deprived of their virtues. And, in consequence of this decadence of the deciduous herbs, living creatures also began to decay. Indeed, owing to the wasting of Soma, all creatures began to be emaciated. Then all the celestials, coming to Soma, O king, asked him, saying, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... smiling and fitting his fingertips together. "Now attend my simile, Captain. Unlike those feathered Romans of the Decadence, we moderns settle for one meal at a sitting, and let it digest in peace. We have instead our more sophisticated greeds, whetted by subtle persuasions and an assurance that it's really quite moral to ransom our ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... that faith men have lived and died, perhaps for centuries; and one cannot see it pass out from the consciousness of humanity without something more than a cursory thought as to the reasons of its decadence. Being led by exceptional causes to take a more than common interest in those forms of belief which lie beyond the pale of the Church of England, I was attracted by a notice in the public journals that on the following morning the Society of Friends would assemble from all ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... no more sentimental lamentation over the decadence of chivalry. There is a broad field open to us, for deeds of chivalrous daring, now, upon the battle-field, amid the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... found more sedentary tribes in villages of bark, encircled by walls of earth, or palisades of wood, whose institutions, commercial spirit, and agriculture, superior to that of the wild rovers, seemed to show the remnant of some more civilized tribe in a state of decadence. Around each isolated tribe lay an unbroken wilderness extending for miles on every side, where the braves roamed, hunters alike of beasts and men. So little intercourse or knowledge of each other existed, so desolate was the wilderness that a vagabond tribe might wander ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... as a man of letters; whereas histories, memoirs, romances, biographies, poetry, statistics, novels, calendars, specimens of almost every kind of composition, are to be found even among the meagre relics which have survived the literary decadence that supervened on the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... But in this new-born, curious mood of his he will not yield, but combats his own innermost conviction, being, in a strange, perverted way, even prouder of this Owen Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the muddiest depths of moral and physical decadence, and come up of the strength of his own will from among the hideous things that hang suspended and drifting in the primeval sludge, than he ever was of the man before his fall. His is a combative nature, and the great blow ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... indeed a certain continuity; the names of several gods of the earliest time are preserved in the legends of the latest. But the influences of many centuries of change, of contending philosophies, of periods of national growth and advance, and of national decadence and decay, have been at work on the mythology of India. Here we have myths that were perhaps originally popular tales, and are probably old; here again, we have later legends that certainly were conceived in the narrow minds of a pedantic and ceremonious priesthood. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... said, and Jane smiled on, yet waited most acceptably and kept all things decently and in order—for a little while. Along about Christmas-time a further decadence and additional flaw in the jewel was discovered, and it was Perkins himself who discovered it. It happened one day while he was at work alone in the house, Mrs. Perkins having gone out shopping. A friend ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... danger confronts us as a nation than the unhappy decadence among our people of genuine and trustworthy love and affection for our Government as the embodiment of the highest and best aspirations of humanity, and not as the giver of gifts, and because its mission is the enforcement of exact justice and equality, and not the ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... even of the elite, who have ever done it, and they belong to the Moral Aristocracy—the smallest and most rigid in the world. This thing that you're just opening your eyes to, is the rage against restraint that goes with decadence. But the phlegmatic Englishman won't ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... in all the forms of life with which we are acquainted, three characteristic periods—first the time of preparation for the purposes of life; next, the time of fitness for those purposes; and thirdly, the time of decadence tending gradually to death. We see among all objects which exist in numbers, examples of all these stages existing at the same time. In every race of living creatures there are the young as yet unfit for work, the workers, and those past work; in every forest there are saplings, seed-bearing trees, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... trudging along, staff in hand, being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring of price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"), already in decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors; and that other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... recognized that the finest type of modern country house follows, in general, this or some other equally admirable model, though it is amusing to note the millionaire's preference for a feudal castle, a French chateau, or an Italian villa of the decadence. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... children must always be taken into consideration along with chinquapin questions. According to authorities on the subject of decadence, we do not care very much about the children in these days. If some old-fashioned folks still remain, and if these old-fashioned folks do not take any particular personal interest in the beautiful garden and lawn trees that America has held out towards us in the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... definitions of Montesquieu, we might say that the principle animating a liberal constitutional government was liberty, and that this involved a definite plan for enlarging the sphere of liberty as the organising principle of civil society. To what then are we to impute the decadence from this type into which parliamentary government seems now to have fallen? Can we attribute this to neglect or to exaggeration of its animating principle, as suggested in the formula of Montesquieu? It is a question which the reader ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless families, irreverent children, and the decadence of the old type of separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and insufficient purposes. Where the home is only an opportunity for self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding-house, a sleeping-shelf, ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... custom are invincible in the country regions, where the peasants are left very much to themselves, the town of Issoudun itself has reached a state of complete social stagnation. Obliged to meet the decadence of fortunes by the practice of sordid economy, each family lives to itself. Moreover, society is permanently deprived of that distinction of classes which gives character to manners and customs. There is no opposition of social forces, such as that to which the cities of the Italian States in the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... we suppose that they were composed by the great delineator, of or toward a person under or much below thirty? They imply that the person addressed was not so far below middle life that a statement of the decadence that would come after his fortieth year presented a remote or far-off picture. Besides, if his friend was below thirty years, while it might be well to urge him to marry, hardly would the poet have used language implying that his marrying days were waning. ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... this end approaching strive to hasten its arrival, or should he oppose it? In a decadent society, to come nearer to the problems which concern us in ethics, must a man strive to realize the social will expressed in progressive decadence? Should he hasten the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... which, like the Fairy Host, sings to the sojourners of the grey world to come and join them in their dance, with "the wind sounding over the hill." My Village is something fresher and gayer and more child-like than that. There is in it nothing of decadence. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... the following short treatise is to give an account of some of those superstitions, now either dead or in their decadence, but which, within the memory of persons now living, had a vigorous existence, at least in the West of Scotland. A secondary object shall be to trace out, where I think I can discover ground for ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... unscholarly version of that masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding's rendering of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hicke's masterly rendering of Lucian's True History? But eternal life means endless change and in nothing is this truth more strikingly manifest than in the growth and decadence of living languages and in the translation of dead tongues into the ever changing tissue of the living. Were it not for this, no translation worthy of the name would ever stand in need of revision, except in instances where the discovery and collation of fresh manuscripts ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the Middle Ages. The issue is sufficient proof of this. For it was falling to pieces, long before the Anglo-Saxon race entered into possession of the territory where it once flourished. The missions are now in a state of decadence, their buildings fast falling into decay; while the red man, disgusted at the attempt to enslave, under the clock of christianising him, has returned to his idolatry, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... "Gentleman long resident in those parts." I have also consulted the brief notices in Dampier's Voyages, Wafer's Voyages, various gazetteers, and some maps and pamphlets relating to Admiral Vernon's attack in 1739-40. There is a capital description of the place as it was in its decadence, circa 1820, in Michael Scott's ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... powerful, and interesting, but lacking in spontaneity and nature. His characters tend to become mere impersonations of some one quality or "humour," as he called it. Thus he is the herald, though a magnificent one, of decadence. He painted in general with a powerful, but heavy hand; in his masques, however, he often shows a singular gracefulness, especially in the lyrics which he introduces. His character, as given by Drummond, is not a particularly attractive one, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... admonishes and he inspires. He knows the "marvellous power and enthralling charm of appropriate and striking words" without dropping into mere word-tasting. "Beautiful words are the very light of thought," he says, but does not maunder about the "colour" of words, in the style of the decadence. And then he "leaves this generation to its fate," and calmly turns himself to the work ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... even upon the most high-spirited. At that moment Madame de Vallorbes was ripe for the commission of atrocities. Had she been—as she coveted to be—a lady of the Roman decadence it would have gone hard with her waiting-woman, who might have found herself ordered for instant execution or summarily deprived of the organs of speech. But, latter-day sentiment happily forbidding such active expressions of ill-feeling on ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... has been pointing out how London lags behind other great cities in the matter of shop-window dressing. There would seem to be no limit to our decadence. Even our shop-windows ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... original conditions, and the whole process begins anew. The first half of such a world-cycle corresponds to the Golden Age of legend in which men lived happily and simply; we have now unfortunately reached some point in the period of decadence. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... hence? It is that men will think one way and speak another; that, consequently, good faith, so essential a virtue to a State, becomes corrupted; that adulation, so detestable, and perfidy, shall be held in honor, bringing in their train a decadence of all good and sound habitudes. What can be more fatal to a State than to exile, as malcontents, honest citizens, simply because they do not hold the opinion of the multitude, and because they are ignorant of the art of dissembling! What can be ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... fact is the turning point of the struggle. From that day dated the decadence of the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Will and I set out to look at the historic sights, and exhausted them all, real and alleged, in less than half a day (for in addition to a lust for ready-cut building stone the Turks have never cherished monuments that might accentuate their own decadence). After that we fossicked in the manner of prospectors that we are by preference, if not always by trade, eschewing polite society and hunting in the impolite, amusing places where most of the facts have teeth, sharp and ready to snap, ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... scene to-night, every 'crack' ball this winter will be, not the pleasant society of men and women, but—even in this young country—an orgie such as rotting Corinth saw, a frenzied festival of Rome in its decadence." ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... during the decadence of nations, when it has been hired by wealth as the minister of luxury. Exquisite art and degrading corruption were contemporary in Greece as well as in Rome. Phidias and Iktinos had scarcely completed the Parthenon, when the glory ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... together. In times of danger, small proprietors more and more put themselves under the protection of the richer and stronger: that is, allodial property became feudal. This custom had begun long before, in the decadence of the Roman empire, when not only poor freemen, but also men of moderate means, ruined by taxation, put themselves under the protection of the great, and settled on their lands. They became thus colons (coloni). In the later times of disorder of which we are now speaking, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... than the new Parisian narrowness—the cant of decadence. Look at my cousin Sidney. He talks as if the Jew only introduced moral-headache into the world—in face of the corruptions of paganism which are still flagrant all over Asia and Africa and Polynesia—the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... be the end of Respectability, but the end is still far distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... well too—without a subsidy. One result may be safely predicated—that the winner will be the first to give in; and the timid may comfort themselves with the assurance, that neither national prosperity nor 'decadence' depends on the issue. A line to run from Liverpool to Portland, in the state of Maine, is in contemplation; and the Cunard Company are building four screw-steamers—the Andes, Alps, Jura, and Etna—which are to carry the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... home here in Memphis," he observed, when the old man had expressed his surprise at the decadence and melancholy change in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in 1250; and from this year we may date both the disruption of the Empire and the decadence of the free Italian commune. What he had failed to effect, with the united power of Sicily and Germany behind him, was accomplished by a score of petty local dynasties. At Milan the Visconti completed the enslavement which the Delia Torre had first planned; at Verona it was the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... man of genuine influence and importance on his own account, just as now by the neglect, or worse, of his parents the very rich boy is apt to be relegated to the limbo of curiosities, and too often of decadence. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... president of the Bordeaux Parliament; devoted himself to a study of literature and jurisprudence; published "Persian Letters" in 1721, which secured him an election to the Academy in 1728; traveled in Austria, Italy, Germany, Holland and England; published "Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans" in 1734, and "Spirit of the Laws" ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... was named from General William Heath, is a striking example of the decadence of the New England hill towns, its population having fallen from eleven hundred and ninety-nine in the year 1830, to five hundred and sixty-eight at present. The site of old Fort Shirley is in the township. Fifty years ago, the town afforded an unusual ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... the overcrowded countries where they were living and sent them to you, that you may mass your forces and lend a hand to save them." No such opportunity ever came to a nation before. The Christian church must seize it or sink into deserved decadence and decay. Only a missionary church can save the world or justify its own existence. The manner in which American Christianity deals with the religious problems of immigration will decide what part America is to play in the ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... be credited with one of the most living figures that have ever been made—a figure which rides on the very highest crest of the wave, and neither admits possibility of further advance towards realism without defeating its own purpose, nor shows even the slightest sign of decadence. Of the figure of the Countess of Serravalle, to which I have already referred, Torrotti said it was so much admired in his day that certain Venetian cavaliers offered to buy it for its weight in gold, but that ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... and almost touched thy temples bare, Edged with a few flakes of the whitest hair. And, soothed by the faint hum of ebbing seas, And song of birds, and breath of the young breeze, Thus didst thou sit, feeling the summer air Blow gently;—with a sad still decadence, Sinking to earth in hope, but all alone. Oh! hast thou wept to feel the lonely sense Of earthly loss, musing on voices gone! Hush the vain murmur, that, without offence, Thy head may rest in peace beneath ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... Lord Henry murmured. "It is the motto of decadence. It means that the moment the Union Jack is unfurled, the voice of criticism, the intellect, and the first principles of justice and ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... as a pupil of the dramatists. But his tendencies and ambitions were not dramatic, so he escaped the diseases that afflicted the drama in its decadence. When he began to write blank verse, the blank verse of the dramatists, his contemporaries, was fast degenerating into more or less rhythmical prose. Suckling and Davenant and their fellows not only used the utmost license of redundant syllables at the end of ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... and children was again absorbed, and so absolutely that any household knowledge ended then and there, with no further possibility of its acquisition. It was this state of things, with its accumulated results, which, a generation or so later, faced the few investigators who puzzled over the decadence of morals, the enfeebled physiques, the general helplessness of the young women who married, and the whole series of natural consequences. So startling were the facts developed, that it became at once evident that a change must be brought about, if only as a ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... are of all literary merit, written during a visit to the 'New World,' may be, just now, worth presenting to 'every-day sort of people,' like myself, who have little time to travel; and, unable to do both, would rather watch the free growth of a new country, than observe the decadence and decrepitude of old ones. For just now, when a large part of our labouring population is strangely awakening to the impression, that a dollar a-day and a vote at elections in the United States are better than eightpence a-day in Ireland; the New Home to which ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... of the history of chariot racing. One marvels at the man who, in such a period, preserved this mood of liberal leisure. His style is perfectly suited to the matter; diffuse, ornate, amusingly affected; altogether a precious mode of writing, characteristic of literary decadence. When the moment demands it, he is pompously grandiloquent; in dealing with a delicate situation, he becomes involved and obscure. We perceive in him a born courtier, a proud noble, a statesman of high purpose ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... olfactory sensations play in human sexual selection. The special peculiarity of this group of sensations in man, and that which gives them an importance they would not otherwise possess, is due to the fact that we here witness the decadence of a sense which in man's remote ancestors was the very chiefest avenue of sexual allurement. In man, even the most primitive man,—to some degree even in the apes,—it has declined in importance to give place to the predominance of vision.[85] Yet, at that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Debate disputo. Debauch dibocxigi. Debauch dibocxo. Debility malforteco. Debit debito. Debris rubo—ajxo. Debt, to get into sxuldigxi. Debt sxuldo. Debtor sxuldanto. Debut komenco. Decadence kadukeco. Decalogue dekalogo. Decant transversxi. Decanter karafo. Decapitate senkapigi. Decay kadukeco. Decaying kaduka. Decease (v.) morti. Deceit artifiko—eco. Deceive trompi. Deceived, to be trompigxi. December Decembro. Decent deca. Deception ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... interests. Patriotism cannot be reduced to a mere question of money, and a nation which has grown tired of the responsibilities of empire, and careless of the acquisitions of its past and of its greatness in the future, would indeed have entered into a period of inevitable decadence. Happily we have not yet come to this. I believe the overwhelming majority of the people of these islands are convinced that an England reduced to the limits which the Manchester school would assign to it would be an England shorn ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... There we have only an imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain ...
— Progress and History • Various
... it never is, unless it suits the immediate taste of the cliques. Clique-Art, clique-Literature, clique-Criticism, keep all three things on a low ground that slopes daily more and more toward decadence. And the pity of it is, that the English get judged abroad chiefly by what their own journalists say of them,— thus, if Sarasate is coldly criticised, foreigners laugh at the 'UNmusical English,' whereas, the fact is that the nation itself is NOT unmusical, but ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... mystery, attended by a sad-faced daughter and two ancient domestics. It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy. The decadence was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on. I had left the chamber of the—shall I say de jure King of England?—a sentimental adherent of the cause. But this business of the bagpipes ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... mildly surprised. Certainly Edward must have changed, or he would not keep such company. But, prejudiced against her son as she had been by her husband's misrepresentations, she feared that this was only another proof of Edward's moral decadence. ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... genius and talent to the demand thus created and encouraged should last indefinitely could not be expected: that the demand itself should lead to overproduction and glut was certain. But, as we shall see, there was no sudden decadence; the period even of best or nearly best production went on with no important intermission; and was but yesterday still represented by two great names, is still represented by one, among the older writers, by more than one or two names of credit among the middle-aged and younger. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... explorer was always emboldened by that impulse, and, if there ever be a future of decadence, it will live again in ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... of Cope in "Religious Education in the Family," the following is quoted: "The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless families, irreverent children, and a decadence of the old type of separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and insufficient purposes. When the home is only an opportunity for self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding house, a sleeping shelf, an implement for social advantage. While it is true that ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... which is the offspring of the abundance and equality of our garden products is from another point of view equivalent to decadence. For the weevil, as for ourselves, progress in matters of food and drink is not always beneficial. The race would profit better if it remained frugal. On the bean and the vetch the Bruchus founded colonies in which the infant ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... apparent, were not "true" children. "Forced upon her," said Mr. Brumley. "It makes one ill to think of it!" It certainly very nearly made him ill. And as if these exercises in distinction had inflamed his conscience Mr. Brumley wrote two articles in the Hebdomadal denouncing impure literature, decadence, immorality, various recent scandalous instances, and the suffragettes, declaring that woman's place was the home and that "in a pure and exalted monogamy lies the sole unitary basis for a civilized state." The most remarkable thing about this article is an omission. That Sir ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... ignorant, unprincipled man, who had not even any religion. Euphemia was his mistress, and a victim of heredity; all the signs of degeneration were noticeable in her. The chief wire-puller in this affair was Maslova, presenting the phenomenon of decadence in its lowest form. "This woman," he said, looking at her, "has, as we have to-day heard from her mistress in this court, received an education; she cannot only read and write, but she knows French; she is illegitimate, and probably carries in her the germs of criminality. ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... M. Renan in his history of Averroes shows how much of this prosperity and intellectual pre-eminence was due to the Jews. The cruel edicts of Philip Augustus against the race proved no less disastrous here than the expulsion of Huguenots elsewhere later. The decadence of Narbonne as a port is due to natural causes. Formerly surrounded by lagoons affording free communication with the sea, the Languedocian Venice has gradually lost her advantageous position. The transitional stage induced such unhealthy climatic conditions that ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of decadence was in progress in England, which Alfred's wise reign was powerless to arrest, and which his greatness may even have tended to hasten. The distance between the king and the people had widened from ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... at Port-au-Prince, the capital. "Unless you are compelled to land there," said he, "I advise you to avoid Hayti." He fully confirmed the reports of its barbarous condition, and declared it to be in a rapid decadence, as regarded every desirable element of civilization. In the country, a short distance from either Gonaives, Jacmel, or Port-au-Prince, where the mass of the negro population live, Voudou worship and cannibalism are quite ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... accurate delineation of individual character, which, instead of representing men and women, are didactic exhibitions of the author himself, projected into various personages, and all bearing an unmistakable family resemblance—this it is that is at the bottom of the sudden decadence into which the writings of one or two of our more prolific romancers have fallen, past all redemption; and this is the great fault of Mr. JAMES. 'To be successful in the exact delineation of character,' says the reviewer, 'requires a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... "you speak like a man, but she has no man to stand loyally by her in the direst need a human soul may know. He is only a thing—no man at all—only a loathsome accident of animated decadence." ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... able, and probably it is impossible, to define madness, or to give a clearly marked indication of the boundary line between sanity and insanity. Mental soundness is merged in unsoundness by degrees of decadence which are so small as to be practically inappreciable. It is with the mind-state which precedes the development of recognized form of insanity the therapeutist and the social philosopher are chiefly interested. ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... everything else. We find metaphors, rhymes, music, color, but not man, not humanity. Poetry of this factitious kind may beguile one at twenty, but what can one make of it at fifty? It reminds me of Pergamos, of Alexandria, of all the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty of thought and exhaustion of feeling. I strongly share the repugnance which this poetical school arouses in simple people. It is as though it only cared to please the world-worn, the over-subtle, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... temeraire, Prenant votre vol jusqu'aux cieux, Vous pouvez egaler Voltaire, Et pres de Virgile et d'Homere. Jouir de vos succes heureux, Deja l'Apollon de la France, S'achemine a sa decadence, Venez briller a votre tour, Elevez vous s'il brille encore; Ainsi le couchant d'un beau jour, Promet une plus belle aurore.' [Footnote: Supplement ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... us! To hear this news made Robert and me very melancholy. Indeed, there seems to be fatality just now with the writers of France. Soulie, Bernard, gone too; George Sand translating Mazzini; Sue in a socialistical state of decadence—what he means by writing such trash as the 'Peches' I really can't make out; only Alexandre Dumas keeping his head up gallantly, and he seems to me to write better than ever. Here is a new book, just published, by Jules Sandeau, called 'Sacs et Parchemins'! Have ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... M. Leroy-Beaulieu had described years before the practical extinction of the family and the government interference[34] brought about by the discoveries made by the government inspecting committee, upon whom consternation seized as they found decadence of morals, enfeebled physique, and that the ordinary girl-worker at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, or make a broth, or care for a child's needs or the simplest demands of a home. Appalled at ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... speculate upon a Trans-Neptunian planet, and Lowell did try to have accepted heretical ideas as to marks on Mars, attention is now minutely focused upon such technicalities as variations in shades of Jupiter's fourth satellite. I think that, in general acceptance, over-refinement indicates decadence. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... "art for art's sake" doctrine, carried to extremes, results in mere decadence or triviality. It produces at best exquisite decorative trifles rather than works of a large and serious beauty. Music seems to be the art where sheer beauty of form is its own justification, for music can hardly be used as a specific medium of communication. Those compositions that ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... passage in the first chapter of the fourth tract in which the "good old times" are lamented and contrasted with the decadence of the then present—now ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal to the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of late years she, in conjunction with her mother and the rest of the pious folks, have succeeded in spoiling our old Worse to such an extent that I do not care to sully this paper by a description of his lamentable decadence. I shall, therefore, restrain my grief and anger, and will ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland |
