"Decadent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... everywhere yielded to them, and while the more prosperous Romans settled on the coast, the others retired to the mountains. One of the sea-towns, by the way, to which the Romans fled was Split, where they could live in the ruins of Diocletian's enormous, decadent palace; and from extant lists of the mayors of that town we see that until the tenth century they all had Latin names, from then till the twelfth century we find partly Latin and partly Slav names, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... had been able to swing to it, my credit was still good. Even "Buck" de Vries was not forgotten, and without a suggestion of my contemplated departure I entertained my colleagues royally with a bowl of punch brewed after a celebrated Cambridge recipe, which in a decadent age spoke eloquently of the glories of the past. I was in the midst of a highly colored speech—during which I must confess de Vries had eyed me in a somewhat saturnine manner—when the proprietor tapped me on the shoulder and said that I was wanted outside. Excusing myself ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... 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. Such at least is what ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... Rome or in Venice, 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 ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... sigh, habit directing me to the door of the study, where I paused, reminded of Jerry's final admonitions. Dinner—"nothing elaborate," with an entree, salad, and wines to be got for two women, Jerry's beautiful decadent who loved nature and ornithology, and the "not very pretty" poor relation who didn't like men but could be "cheerful when she was expected to be." Damn her cheerfulness! It was inconsiderate of Jerry to set me to squiring ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... 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
... is for the dead. The last reward perhaps of a breaking heart. The life effective, militant, is the only possible existence for men. Pull yourself together, Mannering, for Heaven's sake. Yours is the faineant spirit of the decadent, masquerading in the garb of a sham primitivism. Were you born into the world, do you think, to loiter through life an idle worshipper at the altar of beauty? Who are you to dare to skulk in the quiet places, whilst the battle of life is ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... enormously, drinking—sometimes 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 middle age. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the sea and commanding a superb view of the Bay of Salerno. It is a baroque structure of the type common everywhere in Italy, which travellers are apt to despise without acknowledging how picturesque this decadent style of architecture can appear. At Prajano the wooden doors of green faded to the hue of ancient bronze, the yellow-washed plaster facade and the lichen-covered tiles of the roof and tower make up a charming mass of varied ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... only a means to an end. The object of all progress is to get a clear, clean-sighted race, intellectual and broadminded. And I think physical fitness is a great help in the production of a clear, clean mind. The very clever man who is weak bodily is so apt to become a decadent; and because he himself can't stand any real exertion, despises those who can. Games are necessary as a means to an end. But Buller and all the rest of the lot think games are the actual end. Look at the way a man with his footer cap is idealised and worshipped. He may be an utter ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... apartment-houses where children are not wanted are on the 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 ...
— 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.
... last are indistinguishable from the fact, so far as the mind which gave them being is concerned. The body of this girl is young, but her brain may be cankered by the sins and lies of a long line of decadent ancestry." The thought was horrible, but it was less revolting than the alternative—in no other way could her life be explained and excused. In any case it was highly courageous in her to put marriage ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... "More Songs from Vagabondia", 1896; and "Last Songs from Vagabondia", 1900, — which introduced a new note into American poetry, and appearing, as they did, in the nineties, formed a wholesome contrast to some of the work then emanating from the "Decadent School" in England. Among the finest of Mr. Carman's volumes, aside from his work with Richard Hovey, are "Behind the Arras: A Book of the Unseen", 1895; "Ballads of Lost Haven", 1897; "By the Aurelian Wall, and Other Elegies", 1899; "The Green Book ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... port. Sir Peter was for the moment out of pain and anxious to assert his freedom from doctors. The conversation shifted to submarines. Sir Peter thought them an underhand and decadent development suited to James, who was in command ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... They were men, these desert dwellers, master and servants alike; men who endured, men who did things, inured to hardships, imbued with magnificent courage, splendid healthy animals. There was nothing effete or decadent about the men with whom Ahmed Ben ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... 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
... was thus the glory of the XIXth Dynasty, reigned sixty-eight years, and lived to the age of 100, when he passed away peacefully at Thebes. Under his successors, Minephtah, Seti II., Amenemis and Siphtah, the nation became decadent, though there were transient gleams of prosperity, as when Minephtah won a great victory over the Libyans. But after the death of Siphtah, there were many claimants for the Crown, and anarchy prevailed from one end of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... causes Durant had fallen into a state of extreme dissatisfaction with himself. Five years ago he had found himself, as they said; found himself out, he said, when at the age of thirty-three he condemned himself and his art as more decadent than the decadents. Frida Tancred had shown insight when she reproached him with his inability to see anything that he could not paint, or to paint anything that he could not see. She had shown him the vanity of the sensuous aspect, she had forced him to love the intangible, the unseen, till he ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the Irish Party, in its more decadent days, to spout out long litanies of its achievements and to claim credit, as a sort of hereditament no doubt, for the reforms won under the leadership of Parnell. It was, when one comes to analyse it, a sorry method of appealing for public confidence—a sort of apology for present failures ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Cardinal galloped in the moonlight like some splendid machine of bronze, never a misstep, never a false estimate, never the difference of a finger's length in the long, even jumps. It might have been the one-eyed Agib riding his mighty horse of brass, except that no son of a decadent Sultan ever carried the bulk of Orange Jud. And the eccentric El Mahdi! There was no cause for fault-finding on this night. He galloped low and easily, gathering his grey legs as gracefully as his splendid, nervous mother. I watched his mane fluttering in the stiff breeze, his slim ears ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... were ever true 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 a redemption in euthanasia), ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... European culture. In the first period of his relationship with Wagner, he thought that he had found the man who was prepared to lead in this direction. For a long while he regarded his master as the Saviour of Germany, as the innovator and renovator who was going to arrest the decadent current of his time and lead men to a greatness which had died with antiquity. And so thoroughly did he understand his duties as a disciple, so wholly was he devoted to this cause, that, in spite of all his ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... summon batteries of guns 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 ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... harmony between basal and finer muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. It can serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, predispose the heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue. That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find vent. Its ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was that of a mediaevalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching it even to Germany, from which it had partly come." ("A ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... American Senator are cited as examples of the refining influences of apples. For every day for thirty years he has, to the exclusion of all other food, lunched on that fruit. Possibly the papaw may be decadent in respect to morals and politics. The grape, lemon, orange, pomelo, and the strawberry, each in the estimation of special enthusiasts, is proclaimed the panacea for many of the ills of life. One writer cites cases in which maniacs have been restored to reason ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... from 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 scholars of David painted classical scenes, and Pietro Longhi ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... fingers, for he was a simple-minded country lad with no knowledge of women, and many fears of the traps which await the unwary in a great city. Many stories were afloat of pugilists who had been taken up and cast aside again by wealthy ladies, even as the gladiators were in decadent Rome. It was with some suspicion therefore, and considerable inward trepidation, that he faced round as a tall veiled figure swept into the room. He was much consoled, however, to observe the bulky form of Tom Cribb immediately behind her as a proof that the interview was not to be a private ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... His best novel (the finest in American Literature) was The Scarlet Letter (1850).... Montaigne. Stevenson was heavily indebted to this wonderful genius. See Note 4 of Chapter VI above. ... Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote the brilliant and decadent Fleurs du Mai (1857-61). He translated Poe into French, and was partly responsible for Poe's immense vogue in France. Had Baudelaire's French followers possessed the power of their master, we should be able to forgive ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are done for. Decadent in morals, in physique, mean mentally and spiritually, they are even worse off than respectfully cherished ruins, because they are out of fashion; they and their dingy dwellings. Our house is on the market; I'd be glad to see it ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... haven't been 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 ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... he had rigorously pursued the path marked out for him by tradition and his own earliest propensities, he might have been an unpleasant person for a young ladies' tea-party and an unsympathetic person to a gathering of decadent artists; he might indeed have become as heavy as Cromwell and as inhuman as Milton; but he would never have fallen from Olympus with the ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... 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, and therefore, to the spectator, more poignant. We learn ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... but never of the cat. All the associations we have with cats have not accustomed us to that discordant howl. It converts love itself into a torment such as can be found only in the pages of a twentieth-century novel. In it we hear the jungle decadent—the beast in dissolution, but not yet civilised. When it rises at night outside the window, we always explain to visitors: "No; that's not Peter. That's the cat next door with the yellow eyes." The man who will not defend the honour of his cat cannot ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less vigorous Antonio de Trueba, and of Madrid vulgarians, headed by Mesonero Romanos and Coloma. The decadent novel, foreshadowed a few years since by Alejandro Sawa, has attained full maturity in Hoyos y Vinent, while the distinctive growth of the century is the novel of ideas, exact, penetrating, persistently suggestive in the larger sense, which ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... the poet of a decadent epoch, an epoch in which art had arrived at the over-ripened maturity of an aging civilization; a glowing, savorous, fragrant over-ripeness, that is already softening into decomposition. And to be the fitting ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... been described as decadent, "The very Verlaine of them all," and Victor Meusy personifies it in a poem dedicated to all the great French cheeses, of which ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... showing without the support of the art of such a man as Anders Zorn, who, while decidedly Swedish, is after all much of a cosmopolitan painter, with all the earmarks of an international training. The art of the most artistic of all people, that of the French, is often said to have a decadent note. In comparison, Swedish art may be said to be absolutely robust, healthy, and vigorous, without being coarse. To those who pretend to find a certain physical brutality in Swedish art, I should like to point out that the most delicate ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... yourself in at the 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 ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... comes decadent art. But that is of little consequence. Decadence in art is often far from ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... for 1916-1917) continues as the foremost technician and harmonist. His accurate and tasteful lines satisfy the ear and the understanding with equal completeness, and he shows no sign of yielding to the corrupting influences of decadent modern standards. In his own journal, The Piper, he reveals a versatile and phenomenally well stocked mind. The September number, containing imitations of the work of other amateur poets, will long be remembered. Mrs. Renshaw maintains her high place as a philosophical and expressionistic ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... arrangement of such a costume, at so many scenes of trying on and draping! And as he drew easily, he willingly threw his ideas on paper, as he said, neatly. He had even designed the costumes of a little piece—played in I do not know what little theatre—which was revolutionary, anarchistic, symbolistic, decadent, end of the century, ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... 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
... full share of ministering to the decadent and the unhappy at St. Ignace, and he was therefore very pleased one day to be called on by the Rev. Mr. Abercorn, incumbent of St Basil's at Hawthorne, the latter a small settlement, about nine miles distant, in which the English element predominated. Once a year the congregation ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... 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 ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Potawatomi, and were always the allies of the English. The Winnebagoes of Wisconsin were of the linguistic family of the Sioux; were generally associated with the confederates against the Americans, and many of their distinguished warriors fought against General Harrison at Tippecanoe. The decadent tribes known in early times as the Illinois, did not play a conspicuous part in the history ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... finding the Roman Empire decadent, crept in on it, and though much more of the invasion was peaceful than we have been accustomed to think, the Romans simply disappearing because family life had been destroyed, children had become infrequent, and divorce had become extremely common, it was not long before they replaced ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... had it done this spring. It had a 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
... 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
... mummified principles. They have nothing to do with social science, which, in its onward march, has distanced them by at least half a century. Their "profound thinkers," their "lofty theorists," do not even succeed in making the two ends of their reasoning meet. They are the decadent Utopians, stricken with incurable intellectual anaemia. The great Utopians did much for the development of the working class movement. The Utopians of our days do nothing but retard its progress. And it is especially their so-called tactics that are ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... Who is a Christian? The Goal The Spur Awakened! Shadows The New 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
... 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 touched the comic. To harry an old valet out of bed and set him droning on pipes in the small hours smacked of a theatrical taste, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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 ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... well as in his sentiment of art, the florid insincerities and mannerisms of the Florentine Academy, as they were still to be seen in the young Leighton's work, found in him an admirable chastener, but it took many years of painfully hard work, lasting until 1852, to undo the evil wrought by decadent Florence. ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... the commercial strength and credit that alone carried her to the triumphant end. The Isthmus and the Caribbean were vital elements in determining the issue of that stern conflict. For centuries, also, the treasures of Mexico and Peru, upon which depended the vigorous action of the great though decadent military kingdom of Spain, flowed towards and accumulated around the Isthmus, where they were reinforced by the tribute of the Philippine Islands, and whence they took their way in the lumbering galleons for the ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... widely found modes of showing respect to animals is known as totemism (see TOTEM AND TOTEMISM), but except in decadent forms there is but little positive worship; in Central Australia, however, the rites of the Wollunqua totem group are directed towards placating this mythical animal, and cannot be termed anything ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... poorer 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
... peoples are evil, 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 ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... is not moved into ecstasy by ecstasy is hopeless. A people that has not the surging, uplifting, onward power that ecstasy gives, is decadent—dead. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... of order, by the excesses of its own development. Already before the close of the fifth century, and with reiterated emphasis in the earlier decades of the fourth, we hear from poets and orators praise of a glorious past that is dead, and denunciations of a decadent present. The ancient training in gymnastics, we are told, the ancient and generous culture of mind and soul, is neglected and despised by a generation of traders; reverence for age and authority, even for law, has disappeared; ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... 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 Manco succeeded, and ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... the decadent idea, what there was of it, went entirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough (unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to be insupportable in the very ways in which it claimed specially to be subtle and tactful; ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... racial and national far more than dynastic. It is not the Hohenzollern over all that they sing about; it is Deutschland. (And—as in the case of all imperfectly civilised people—songs of hate for foreigners.) But it needed a decadent ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... esprits encyclopediques, apres a la curee de toutes les connaissances, qui se rencontrent au commencement et a la fin des civilisations.' For the acquisition of his extraordinary reputation he needed an age and an audience in which learning and literature alike were decadent, though far from forgotten. He has none of the scientific spirit. He does not really understand the authors he quotes; he has no critical spirit, and his own investigations are prompted by indiscriminate curiosity. But he has vast stores of miscellaneous knowledge ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet I could think of no other. Let me put my difficulties. The several big palaces I had explored were mere living places, great dining-halls and sleeping apartments. I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these people were clothed ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... 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; and thus they were as cheaply ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... 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 sport or athletics and their evenings in undermining them with poisonous and dyed drinks; our ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... Margaret. The two had nothing in common, but Margaret was well aware of the nature of the tie which had bound Rita Irvin to this empty and decadent representative of English aristocracy. Mollie Gretna was entitled to append the words "The Honorable" to her name, but not only did she refrain from doing so but she even preferred to be known as "Gretna"—the style of one ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... there may not be a decadent side in Wagner, revealing super-sensitiveness or even hysteria and other modern nervous affections. And if this side was lacking he would not be representative of his time, and that is what every great artist ought to ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... familiar sentences with something like the composed gravity with which they heard on Sundays the reading of the second lesson. But as the stage-talk went on, the slave-maidens announcing themselves without delay comfortably modern and commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and a decadent, though as distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to note the breaking up of this sentiment. It was plain after all that no standard of ideality was to be maintained or struggled after. The relief was palpable; nevertheless, when Pilate's wife cast a shrewish gibe at him over the ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... gymnastics and in sport, is a method of cure and a method of regeneration;" he advocates co-education in this culture of nakedness. Although he makes large claims for nakedness—believing that all the nations which have disregarded these claims have rapidly become decadent—Pudor is less hopeful than Ungewitter of any speedy victory over the prejudices opposed to the culture of nakedness. He considers that the immediate task is education, and that a practical commencement ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... melody but supposed this was too much to ask, these days. The chauvinist detected German influence in the music (he had missed the parodic satire in March's quotations), and asked Heaven to answer why an American composer should have availed himself of a decadent ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... 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 stuck into the ground. The skin is ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... become puppets whose master man feels himself, and whom he treats as he likes. Throughout the manifold techniques, esthetics, documentary collections, reproductions of the social life, the creative activity of the earliest time remains at bottom unchanged. Literature is a decadent and rationalized mythology. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... new principle asserted itself in the religious sphere. The individualism which was inherent in early Christianity, but which was present as a speculative content merely, had not been strong enough to counteract even the remains of corporate tendencies on the material side of things, in the decadent Roman Empire; and infinitely less so the vigorous group-organization and sentiment of the northern nations, with their tribal society and communistic traditions still mainly intact. And these were the elements out of which ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... everywhere in Europe by the name of the Royal libertine. They are powerful enough almost to dominate society, and we poor people who abide by the conventions are absolutely nowhere beside them. They think that we are bourgeois because we have virtue, and prehistoric because we are not decadent." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... said Shelton, "is the way we men decide what women are to bear, and then call them immoral, decadent, or what you will, if they don't fall ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... connection with the Nibelungenlied here offered in 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 of their ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... set foot 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 fate ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... stands still long enough for us to describe it. Even as we write the description it has changed to another phase. And the phenomena of transition just now are particularly noticeable—that is all. We may call them decadent or we may look upon them as the beginnings of a new and ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... 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 out ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... race, you will be found sitting meditating among cabbages and green peas, like Omar Khayym in his rose garden. The rest of us will have died in the fighting-line - except Baby, and they will put him under a glass case, and preserve him as one of the few fine specimens left of a decadent race - in spite of ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... novel is never so concerned to tell the truth as he is to exploit and illustrate an interesting theory. You have no right to expect gospel from literary mountebanks. Nor can you judge the integrity of it by such disciples as Rousseau, who was merely a decadent soul fascinated by the contemplation of his own depravity. The scriptures of such a Solomon, however true in theory, are neither honest nor effective. But as a final climax of your argument, you declare that in your "own experience" you have found these humanitarians ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... love of self is the fundamental principle of all activity. It is the instinct of self-preservation and self-amelioration which leads to every manifestation of revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct. Between the excessive ideality of Rebecca and the decadent sterility of Hedda Gabler comes another type, perhaps more sympathetic than either, the master-builder Solness. He, too, is led to condemn the old order, but in the act of improving it he is overwhelmed upon his pinnacle, and swoons to death, "dizzy, lost, yet unupbraiding." Ibsen's exact meaning ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... virile elements in every country which, because they value their own liberties and revere their own traditions, are able to respect those of other nations. Internationalism is an understanding between the decadent elements in each country—the conscientious objectors, the drawing-room Socialists, the visionaries—who shirk the realities of life and, as the Socialist Karl Kautsky in a description of Idealists has admirably ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... also been found the bones of huge human-like beings whose decadent progeny are still alive in ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... 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 ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... 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 world will cease ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... its streets and schools and homes, until either in the private spending or public voting of the smallest sum we know exactly whether we are so far determining expenditure and influence towards enlarging, say, the influence and example of renascent Florence in one generation or of decadent Versailles in another. There is no danger of awaking this consciousness too fully; for since we have ceased consciously to cite and utilise the high examples of history we have been the more faithfully, because sub-consciously and automatically, continuing and extending later ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... 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 the mastery ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... was the treasure of Peru that kindled the fires of the Inquisition, {65} in which the best blood of the nation lighted it to its downfall, and blazed the way for Manila and Santiago. Philip II, and his decadent and infamous successors depended upon the mines of Potosi and the mines of Potosi hung upon Pizarro and his line in the sand. The base-born, ignorant, cruel soldier wrecked in one moment a nation, made and unmade empires, and changed the ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... motherland and her dependencies. They seemed convinced that every Dominion and dependency was merely waiting for the first favourable opportunity to declare its complete independence, and they hardly troubled to conceal their opinion that Britain was hopelessly decadent, and would never be able to wage a campaign again. Bermuda, in view of its wonderful strategic position, had, I am convinced, been marked down as a future German possession, when they would have endeavoured to make ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... and, by way of praising the Parisians, used to represent them as a species of scatterbrains, lewd and rowdy, who spent their time in love-making and revolutions without ever taking themselves seriously, Christophe was not greatly attracted by the "Byzantine and decadent republic beyond the Vosges." He used rather to imagine Paris as it was presented in a naive engraving which he had seen as a frontispiece to a book that had recently appeared in a German art publication; the Devil of Notre Dame appeared ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... in his place, unsapped yet by decadent delights, would have loosed his five thousand on the countryside—butchered any who opposed him—pressed into service those who merely lagged—and would have plunged India in a welter of blood before the priests had time to mature their plans and arrange to keep all the power and plunder to themselves. ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... 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 ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... 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 ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... because Humanity is looking forward to it too, and insisting on it with no uncertain voice—I look forward to the time when an Irish legislature shall arise once more on the emerald pasture of College Green, and the Union Jack—that detestable symbol of a decadent Imperialism—be replaced by a flag as green as the island over which it waves—a flag on which we shall ask for England only a modest quartering in memory of our great party and of the immortal name of our grand ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... less fresh because he knows it old; but he is of the dawn because it is chiefly those things that are fundamentals, that come out of the beginnings of things, that interest him profoundly, that stir him deeply. Subtleties and complexities, decadent things, are not for him, but simplicities, primordial things, the love of wandering, and what is only less old, the love of land; and love of woman. These three things, and youth, and little else, concern him. Mr. Colum writes, indeed, in the dedication to "Thomas Muskerry" (1910) that he has set ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... nobility of nature greater than they formerly possessed. Nobody can remain standing on tiptoe. After a little time disorder subsides and some strong man leads the inevitable reaction. In France people revolted against a decadent monarchy, and in a dozen years they had a new emperor. In England they beheaded a king as a protest against tyranny, and they got a dictator in his place who took little or no account of parliaments; and finally a second Charles, rather worse ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... families, the absence of any standard except wealth—all these things are set down with the minute realism that must come, I am sure, of intimate personal knowledge. Sylvia is the offspring of one such family, and mated to the decadent heir of another. Her tragedy is that too late she meets a man whom she supposes capable of giving her the fuller, more complete life for which she has always ignorantly yearned. Then there is Anne, the penniless ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... strongest, in fact, upon the external and decorative aspect of the society to which he introduces us. Most of the romances written in imitation of Scott had this tendency; and this same feebleness underlies the superfluous minuteness of detail that may be observed in the decadent realists of the present day. Nothing of this sort can be alleged against Thackeray, who works from inward outwardly in his creations of character, and whose personages are truly historical in the sense that they move and speak naturally according ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... himself says to us, "No, I have not the soul of a decadent, I cannot look within myself, and the effort I make to understand unknown souls is incessant, involuntary and dominant. It is not an effort; I experience a sort of overpowering sense of insight into all that surrounds me. I am impregnated with it, I yield ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... time to Des Esseintes. He abandoned his books, pressed his brow and went to the dining room, saying to himself that, among all the volumes he had just arranged, the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly were the only ones whose ideas and style offered the gaminess he so loved to savor in the Latin and decadent, monastic ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... with singular truth and directness. Their sculpture may not display the anatomical knowledge of the work of the Renaissance; yet it has a distinct decorative value that has been seldom equalled in the later decadent period. The fourteen large central bosses on the main longitudinal ribs present in themselves an epitome not only of Bible history, but of the connecting incidents forming the theme of Christian teaching. In the tenth bay, on the longitudinal rib, there is, in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... in literature doesn't appeal to me. I must say many of these poets strike me as decadent fellows, not helped to anything like ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... downwards, and had a collection of japes at 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 ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... orders," he said coldly. "And we don't know what their orders are. Until we realized you'd get here first, we were making ready to take the kids off in a snow-weasel. If we kept to soft snow, no plane could land near them. It's just possible somebody could claim the kids asked protection from us decadent, warmongering Americans, and they might be equipped to ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... about 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 mother has six, eight, or ten children and her daughter ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... 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 people will die. This is the cooled down atomic pile. At the other ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... took the race ages to acquire. A repetition of the slow steps and stages by which progress has been secured is impossible. Attachment to civilization must take place at its highest point, just as we set a graft upon the most vigorous and healthy limb of a tree, and not upon a decadent stem. Must the Negro dwell for generations upon Anglo-Saxon stems and Cancerian diction before he is introduced to modern forms of English speech? The child of the African slave is under the same linguistic necessity as the offspring of Depew and Gladstone. He must leap, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... danger of class-domination emerges more and more into relief. In Prussia the old Feudal caste remains—in a decadent state, certainly, but perhaps for that very reason more arrogant, more vulgar, and less conscious of any noblesse oblige than even before. By itself, however, and if unsupported by the commercial class, it would probably have done little harm. In Britain the Feudal caste has ceased to be ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... believe, he was well satisfied with it. He used 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 ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 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
... intellectually and morally, in order to pronounce fully and fairly upon the qualities of this drama by Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. He should be an embodied conscience stung into righteous fury by the moral stench exhaled by the decadent and pestiferous work, but, though it make him retch, he should be sufficiently judicial in his temperament calmly to look at the drama in all its aspects and determine whether or not as a whole it is an instructive note on the life and culture of the times and whether or not this exudation ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... confines of China? Let a common wave pass over them, let a great soldier or organiser arise among them to use the grand material at his hand, and who shall say that this may not be the besom with which Providence may sweep the rotten, decadent, impossible, half-hearted south of Europe, as it did a thousand years ago, until it makes room for ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... taxes, serve in the army, and shut their jaws. France must be so completely crushed that she will never again cross our path. You must remember that we have not come to make war on the French people, but to bring them the higher Civilization. The French have shown themselves decadent and without respect for the Divine law. Against England we fight for booty. Our real enemy is England. We have to ... crush absolutely perfidious Albion ... subdue her to such an extent that her influence all over the world is ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... without saying." 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 ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... supernatural, but purely natural. He is an infidel whether he is found in darkest Africa or in the midst of this Christian commonwealth, and in this latter place there are more infidels than most people imagine. A decadent Protestantism rejects the necessity of baptism, thereby ceasing to be Christian, and in its trail infidelity thrives and spreads, disguised, 'tis true, but nevertheless genuine infidelity. It is baptism that makes faith possible, for faith ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... effects of decadent verse is unintentionally told in the following extract from a Hindu's letter to the authorities requesting aid in behalf of his invalid father, who leads sickly life, and is going from bad to perhaps, but not too well; for an extract from the petition calls on the government "to ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the aliens were the rather decadent relics of a highly developed technological civilization existing on the planet in the not too distant past. Yet Miracastle offers no evidence for the existence of a prior technology—no ruins, no residual radioactivity from atomic operations. In short, the city has no apparent ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... our savages are decadent, and grossly androcentric. Their language and customs prove an earlier and higher culture, in which we may trace the matriarchate. Among the less savage savages—as our Pueblos—the women ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... basic ideas, gleaned largely from facts provided by Peter Horry and Robert Marion (the nephew of Francis), remain largely unchanged. Even in this decadent state, Weems' biography brought the nation's attention to Francis Marion, and inspired numerous other writers to touch on the subject — two of these works, biographies by James and Simms, are especially noteworthy. Therefore, for the literary, rather than strictly ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... got down to business. This vital young giant—the West—was not going to let the effete pestholes of the East (by this he meant all the way East, including Stockholm, Athens, and Kashmir) forfeit the Caucasian heritage with their decadent goings-on. The Commie Complex was not going to be handed the rest of the planet on a silver platter because ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... old man of seventy—by his son and his daughter. Nor is that all by any means. There is much worse to follow—matter which we dare not translate, but must leave more or less discreetly veiled in the decadent ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... 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
... have been converted to God through his devotion. Blessed John, a companion of St. Dominic, wrote a book about the miraculous power of the rosary. The blessed Alanus de la Roche tells of a bishop, in whose diocese morality was decadent, who finally took up the devotion to the rosary, explained it to his people, prayed it with them, and had it introduced in all parishes. Soon the people ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... accomplished, it was given to Samuel J. Mills to cry out: "We can if we will!'' And the little company took up the cry and literally shouted it to the heavens: "We can if we will!'' "A growing church among a strong people burdened by a decadent Empire—the spirit of life working against the forces of death and decay in the one great Pagan Empire which the wrecks of millenniums have left on the earth—surely there is a call to service that might fire the spirit of the dullest of us.''[110] The obstacles are indeed formidable, but he who ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... noisome jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life- forms that rooted in death and lived on death. And through all this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows of the anthropophagi, themselves ghosts of evil that dared not face him in battle but that ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... pearl, fantastic, terrible.... What strange tale lives in the gestures of his mouth? Does a fox-maiden, bewitching, tiny-footed, lure a scholar to his doom? Is an unfilial son tortured of devils? Or does a decadent queen sport with ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... my earlier days," said his sire, "through and through I studied that decadent race, And in failing to prove that my forecast was true They have covered themselves ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... panorama of the life of a decadent Abyssinian Prince; with full details of his wardrobe, his taste in liqueurs, his emotions and dissipations.... Simply must be read by anyone who wishes to be 'in it.' It is a liberal education ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... read 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
... This is not vital art, it is decadent and corrupt. True art has always been the expression by the artist of the ideals of his time and of the world in which he lived—ideals which were his own because he was a part of that world. A living and healthy art never ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... veritable art, who possessed talent but not the higher dramatic genius, and who, moreover, was altogether lacking in style. Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas was to him an infamy in verse, and the rest of this author's pieces miserable melodramas. Theophile Gautier's poetry was decadent, his style sparkling with great wit; yet the man was wanting in force of ideas. When, however, he added that Gautier would do nothing that would last because he was engaged in journalism, he spoke with all his hatred of a profession that refused him the honour he deemed his due. Eugene Sue, also, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... upon itself. Moral discipline is indispensable to any class that wants to govern. If the industrial middle class is to take our place, it will have to be austere and hard. What sealed once and for all the doom of the Roman Senators was the decadent Greek culture of their sons. Those young noblemen affected an elegant dilettantism and toyed pleasantly with cultured demagogy. Caesar in his youth, Aurelle, was rather like one of your comfortable cultured French middle-class Socialists. His lifelong dream was to lead a moderate reform party, ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... and all through the way of life in it, there prevailed a "note" of simplicity, even of plainness. The odd thing, perhaps, was that it pleased almost every one who visited the young couple. A certain well-known man, noted as a Sybarite, clever, decadent and sought after, once got into the house, he pretended by stealth, and spent half an hour there in conversation with Rosamund. He came way "acutely conscious of my profound vulgarity," as he explained later to various friends. "Her house revealed to me the hideous fact that all the best ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens |
