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Decadent   /dˈɛkədənt/   Listen
Decadent

adjective
1.
Marked by excessive self-indulgence and moral decay.  Synonym: effete.  "A group of effete self-professed intellectuals"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Decadent" Quotes from Famous Books



... it is necessary to remember that many things that are indefensible when only a few do them, seem to become, by an extraordinary method of reasoning, regarded as allowable when so many people do them that a spurious public opinion and a decadent fashion is born, which shelters them and prevents the light of an unbiassed judgment from showing up their shortcomings in morality. One has only to read up old records of the eighteenth century to see how slavery flourished ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... humanity in one of the most vital periods and movements in history. It 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 whole ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power—but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... merely to look on with feelings approaching awe and fascination. There was something uncanny here—a soldier and athlete weeping and screaming and going into fits at the sight of a harmless grass-snake, probably a mere blind worm! Was he a hysterical, neurotic coward, after all—a wretched decadent? ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... 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 touched the comic. To harry an old valet out of bed and set him droning on pipes in the small hours ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... marbles in public collections. "Graeco-Roman School, of the late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or God of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology." Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to be living again in this ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... 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 huddled up above the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... found the whole thing like a tonic. The intense vitality of the people, the pandemonium of Broadway at midnight, with its flaming illuminations, its eager crowd, its inimitable restlessness, fascinated them both. Sogrange, indeed, remembering the decadent languor of the crowds of pleasure seekers thronging his own boulevards, was never weary of watching these men and women. They passed from the streets to the restaurants, from the restaurants to the theatre, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the proved capacity of New England men. Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce—Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their instinctive ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... society, slaves, criminals, and lunatics. They burrowed in the Catacombs, they fastened themselves upon a decaying and magnificent civilization like the parasites they were. A series of political catastrophes, a popular uprising against the rotten emperors of decadent Rome, and the wide growth of the socialist idea—these things and an unscrupulous man, Constantine the Great, put the Christians firmly in the saddle. And soon came cataracts of blood. If the tales of the imperial persecutions are true, then hath Christianity ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... 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 on ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... and point to the increase of divorce, falling off in church attendance, and the unrest among the laboring classes as evidence that there is a decadence. Pleasure is sought, excitement is the goal, and sober, solid duty is "forgotten." They point out a resemblance to the decadent days of Rome, in the rise of luxury and luxurious tastes, and indicate that duty and the love of luxury cannot coexist. Woman has forgotten her duty to bear children and to maintain the home and man has forgotten ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... rosary was introduced. Entire nations, provinces and cities 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 abandoned their ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings

... we to live only on the glory of the past and die off from the face of the earth, to show that we are worthy descendants of the glorious past and to show by our work, by our intellect and by our service that we are not a decadent nation? We have still a great and mighty future before us, a future that will justify our ancestry. In talking about ancestry, do we ever realise that the only way in which we can do honour to our past is not to boast of what our ancestors ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... glamour of his name. The annals of mediaeval Italy were stained with blood and tears because of the Tor di Rocca, and their loves that ended always in cruelty and horror, and Filippo had all the instincts of his decadent race. In love he was pitiless; no impulses of tenderness or of chivalry restrained him, and his methods were primeval and violent. Probably the Rape of the Sabines was his ideal of courtship, but the subsequent domesticity, the settling down of the ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton

... 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

... next to the right, and let 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 ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... situation; he accused the young because they had remained silent and accepted this last indignity without a protest. God help us, what kind of a youth was that? Was our youth, then, entirely decadent? ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun

... 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." ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... Italian evolution, and writes a narrative that cannot but be partial. If we make the Despots our main point, we repeat the same error in a worse form. The Despotisms imply the Communes as their predecessors. Each and all of them grew up and flourished on the soil of decadent or tired Republics. Though they are all-important at one period of Italian history—the period of the present work—they do but form an episode in the great epic of the nation. He who attempts a general history of Italy from the point of view of the despotisms, is taking a single scene for the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... 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, ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... stream among the Alleghanies, called Lycoming Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a decadent inn, kept by a tremulous landlord who was always sitting on the steps of the porch, and whose most memorable remark was that he had "a misery in his stomach." This form of speech amused the boy, but he did not in the least comprehend it. It was the description ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... watching for her opportunity. On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words "Votes for Women." Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the sufferer's bed, while Teddy Widgett, being something of an athlete, occupied the only bed-room chair—a decadent piece, essentially a tripod and largely a formality—and smoked cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that he was looking all the time at Ann Veronica's eyebrows. Teddy was the hatless young man who had turned Ann Veronica aside from the ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... thin, pointed sticks, which he flung to the ground by the fire. They were the spears the men had made, rough, crude implements compared with the balanced and decorated weapons their fathers had known, but such as would serve to satisfy the hereditary impulse of a decadent race for the weapons of their sires. With one accord the men reached out and seized them, springing to their feet, and standing, with quivering muscles and tremulous hands, as the struggle between inherited ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott

... the pressure of other desires, any group of primates does happen to become less prolific, they will feel ashamed, talk of race suicide, and call themselves decadent. And they will often be right: for though some regulation of the birth-rate is an obvious good, and its diminution often desirable in any planet's history, yet among simians it will be apt to come from second-rate motives. Greed, selfishness or fear-thoughts ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... everybody who doesn't like us is yelling blue murder. Somebody—you may guess who—is announcing that a fleet of ninety-one war rockets took off from the United States and now hangs poised in space while the decadent American war-mongers prepare an ultimatum to all the world. ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster

... Vagabondia", 1894; "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

... small, beautifully shaped hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all her trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physical characteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression—as of an old stock run to seed. The stock had been reinvigorated in my mother, and one of its original elements which certainly survived in her temperament and tradition was of great importance both ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... be recent indications that the sentiment is changing. The heated discussions in New England about Mr. Hartt's interesting clinic over a decadent hill-town, the suggestive fast-day proclamation of Governor Rollins of New Hampshire a few years ago, the marvelous development of agricultural education, the renewed study of the rural school, the widespread and growing delight in country life, have all aroused an interest in and ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield

... that position indulged profusely in leisurely reverie. The book was carefully enough written, and I have been a good deal surprised to find that it has met with considerable disapproval, and even derision, on the part of many reviewers. It has been called morbid and indolent, and decadent, and half a hundred more ugly adjectives. Now I do not for an instant question the right of a single one of these conscientious persons to form whatever opinion they like about my book, and to express ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... with a 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 middle-aged dames while he spooned with ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... can't for the life of me imagine how she could have cared for the fellow, with his face all dried and frayed with make-up. There was something lithe and sinuous about him that may, of course, have appealed to her. And I can understand his infatuation. He was decadent, exhausted; and there would be moments when he found her primitive violence stimulating, before it ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... re-establish not only his Cathedral but also the monastery attached to it. He did this on a great scale, providing accommodation for three times the number of monks that had served the Cathedral in the decadent days of the Saxon monarchy, and when this was done he first "destroyed utterly" the Romano-Saxon church and then "set about erecting a more noble one, and in the space of seven years, 1070- 1077, he raised this from the foundations and brought it near to perfection." ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton

... he, "is a bad egg, a despicable son of a decadent family. His mother was Hedrik Von Taer's sister, but the poor thing has been dead many years. Not long ago Charlie was tabooed by even the rather fast set he belonged to, and the Von Taers, especially, refused to recognize their relative. Now he seems to go ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne

... both in Europe and America, may be the infection of their blood by trypanosomes, and that possibly, whilst a freely migrating and vigorous herd would not be extensively infected, a dwindled and confined herd may be more liable to infection, and that thus the final destruction of an already decadent animal may be brought about. It would now be a matter of extreme interest to ascertain whether the few dwindled herds of bison in North America are infected by trypanosomes, and no doubt we shall soon receive reports ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... institutions; in the Russian Mir, in its older form; in the Arab tribal organisation and the Javan village communities."[1058] That "primitive Communism" of "tribal society," the organisation of savages and semi-savages, of the decadent and of the unfit, Socialists wish to foist upon a highly cultured nation. The above arguments, penned by the philosopher of British Socialism and the editor of "Justice" in recommendation of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... 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 of ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... 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

... might have been much better than The Last Days of Pompeii: and The Complaint of Deor, in its allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now left untold. A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... his face is like a mask of lacquer, set with teeth of 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

... Engleton, an orphan brought up in Paris, a would-be decadent, a dabbler in all modern iniquities, redeemed from folly only by a certain not altogether wholesome cleverness, yet with a disposition which sometimes gained for him friends in most unlikely quarters. He had excellent ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... disdained flamboyant types and snubbed the gay and gildy brand; Instead she loved a decadent whose pagan name was Hildebrand, Until that sad occasion when she met him coming back o' night, His system loaded up with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various

... days," said his sire, "through and through I studied that decadent race, And in failing to prove that my forecast was true They have ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various

... may be said with respect to the churches. In every city there are several, and people can usually go to the church of their choice. In many parts of the country the church is decadent, and in some places it is becoming extinct. Even the automobile contributes its influence against the country church as a rural institution, and in favor of the city; for people who are sufficiently well-to-do often ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... them otherwise if he will. After all the best use of a history is probably to stimulate readers to think for themselves about the events portrayed; and if I have succeeded in doing that, I shall be satisfied. The history of the United States does mean something: what is it? Are we a decadent fruit that is rotten before it is ripe? or are we the bud of the mightiest tree of time? The materials for forming your judgment are here; form it according as your faith ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... despises Brahms, and thinks that he had nothing to say. Wagner is, for him, a decadent, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... on the other hand, has become more decadent than aggressive. This among other rural agencies is not organized in proportion to its importance. Some progress, however, is being made by means of social organizations, but the ultimate solution of the rural problem depends more largely ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst

... view 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, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... 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 ports of the Peninsula. Where factors of such decisive influence in European ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... books—French was the only modern language worth reading he used to say—a few modern German etchings, a low Turkish divan, and some Egyptian antiquities, made up the furniture of his two sitting-rooms. Above all things he despised Greek art; it was, he said decadent. The Egyptians and the Germans were, in his opinion, the only people who knew anything about the plastic arts, whereas the only music he could endure was that of the modern French School. Over his chimney-piece there was a large German landscape in oils, called "Im Walde"; it ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring

... order to survive, an aristocracy must be hard 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 ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois

... thousand detectives would ever have queered his pitch. But he was as playful as any other hunting tiger. He rejoiced in adding a thousand details to his original scheme. He was an artist, but too florid, too decadent in his decorations. And so he ruined what might have been the crime of the century. It is just the touch of human fallibility that has brought Nemesis to many ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... will deny that England stands to-day otherwise than she stood a hundred and thirty-two years ago, when George was born. To-day we are living a decadent life. All the while that we are prating of progress, we are really so deteriorate! There is nothing but feebleness in us. Our youths, who spend their days in trying to build up their constitutions by sport or athletics ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... had for 14 months. We have a theory out here similar to Miss ——to wit, that there is no war. We have come to the conclusion that the whole thing is engineered by Heath Robinson, Horatio Bottomley and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Heath Robinson because he thinks humour is decadent, Horatio Bottomley to advertise "John Bull," and the Archbishop to cause a religious revival. How it is worked is as follows:—Heath Robinson bought a chateau in Flanders and a Crimean war gun. Then Churchill and the Kaiser came into the show. They bring ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack

... has become decadent?—if my hand has lost its cunning? What if I am no longer worthy?' He was seized with such panic at the thought, that he set himself wildly to find some immediate means of proving to himself the irrational nature of his fears. He would instantly compose some difficult verses, draw ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... dependence on me was quite pathetic. His general attitude was, "You see I'm such a damned fool." And so he is. But when I compare him with the Balzacian hauteur and the preposterous posing of many of our Fleet Street decadent geniuses, I feel a movement of the blood which declares that perhaps there are worse things than War. (Between ourselves, I have a sneaking sympathy with fighting: I fought horribly at school. It is well you should ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... family life. The family has in every civilized age been justly regarded as the pillar of the state, but the integrity which it possessed among our fathers, their children invaded in many ways. Mormonism, decadent if not dead, about which so much had been said, was but one of these, and perhaps not the worst. If crimes of a violent nature were becoming less frequent, crimes against chastity were on the increase. Easy divorce was considerably responsible for this. The diversity of marriage and divorce laws ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... can be fulfilled under reasonably favorable circumstances. If a race does not have plenty of children, or if the children do not grow up, or if when they grow up they are unhealthy in body and stunted or vicious in mind, then that race is decadent, and no heaping up of wealth, no splendor of momentary material prosperity, can avail in any degree as offsets. The Congress has the same power of legislation for the District of Columbia which the State legislatures have for the various States. The problems incident to ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... regular plaintive plea for 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 French libretto. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... on the Jews in the Holy Land. Professor Simon Litman of our Faculty spoke on "Jews and Modern Capitalism." Professor E. C. Baldwin of our English department, in speaking on "Prayer," roused a lively interest in the question as to whether prayer is decadent among the Jews. Professor Albert H. Lybyer lectured on "Jews as the Transmitters of Culture from the Moslems to the Christians"; Professor Boyd H. Bode discussed "What the Jew Contributes to American Ideals," and Dr. A. R. Vail spoke ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... (1) cadence, decadent, case, casual, casualty, occasion, accident, incident, mischance, cheat; (2) casuistry, coincide, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token, of the spontaneous originality of his muse. For a writer of his peculiar philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in truth, must seem irretrievably old or even decadent. ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... young were drowned, I cry for my babies—I, the Crown Princess of Saxony, who saved your family from dying out, a degenerate, depraved, demoralized, decadent race." ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer

... to languish if it gets too far away from primitive conditions. But, like life also, it is a poor thing and a very uncouth affair if it has nothing but primitive conditions to recommend it. Because there is a decadent art about, one need not make a hero of the pavement artist. But without going to the extreme of flouting the centuries of culture that art inherits, as it is now fashionable in many places to do, students ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... had excuses. They were the natural results of a complete lack of parental discipline and school training. They ran amuck, advertised by the press and applauded by the hawks who pounced upon their wallets. They were more to be pitied than condemned, far more foolish and ridiculous than decadent. They were not unique, either, or peculiar to their own country. Every nation possessed its "smart set," its little group of men and women who were ripe for the lunatic asylum, and even the war and its iron tonic had failed to shock them into sanity. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... too close an imitation of the ancients. More specific reasons concurred in recommending it. In the Garden of Eden he might present to an age which was overrun with a corrupt religion and governed by a decadent court the picture of a religion without a church, of life in its primitive simplicity, and of patriarchal worship without the noisome accretions of later ceremonial. His attitude to the Laudian movement is eloquently expressed, at this same time, in the treatise ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... drawing-room; she had 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 thin ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... for the chestnuts flung to them in that chamber of the Apostolic Palace by Christ's Vicar—an 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 Latin of the Caerimoniarius: ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... de Rambouillet, there were, in the seventeenth century, but two great salons that exerted a lasting influence and that were not saturated with the decadent preciosite. Of these the salon of Mlle. de Scudery has been called the salon of the bourgeoisie, because the majority of its frequenters belonged to the third estate, which was rapidly acquiring ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... 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 ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... prove decadent? Shall not one produce in time Perfect types of men and women In a world devoid ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... singer, 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 Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd

... bring this home, without introducing a sickly atmosphere of decadent art and literature into my valley of the bay-trees? And yet, an instance is needed. Well; there is an old story, originating perhaps in Suetonius, handed on by Edgar Poe, and repeated, with variations, by various modern French ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... mentality masked by that rat-like face, Lanyard waited with a hand covertly grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... of Saltus's peculiar genius. The emperors of imperial decadent Rome are led by the chains of art behind the chariot wheels of the poet: Julius Caesar, whom Cato called "that woman," Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, the wicked Agrippina, for whom Agnes Repplier named her cat, Claudius, Nero, Hadrian, Vespasian, down to the incredible Heliogabolus. Saltus, who ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... desert; the new pessimism towards the restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; in their lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair. It ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... Orders of Chivalry. The siege of 1565 was its last great struggle with its mortal foe; after that there is but little left for the historian but to trace its gradual decadence and fall. And, as might be expected in a decadent society, though outwardly the constitution changed but little in the last two centuries, yet gradually the Statutes of the Order and the actual facts became more ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen

... 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, ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... "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

... foremost in praising, and quite rightly, the spirit shown in every part of their country. Their lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles, for if in truth England had been decadent there could have been no such universal display for them to be praising now. But all this democratic grumbling and habit of "going as you please" serve a deep purpose. Autocracy, censorship, compulsion destroy ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... Schleswig, Holstein, Alsace, and Lorraine by war, and Saxony and Bavaria by benevolent assimilation. The present Kaiser has already acquired Belgium by the former and Austria by the latter process. Like the Rome of Caesar, the German Empire is now at war on the one hand with decadent civilizations and on the other with a horde of barbarians. What Greece and Carthage were to Rome, France and England are to Germany, while Russia is the modern counterpart of the Gauls, Britons, and Germans of the Commentaries. Such at least is what certain writers ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller

... population, though of inferior quality. The Cnossian palace was re-occupied in its northern part by chieftains WHO have left numerous rich graves; and general commercial intercourse must have been resumed, for the uniformity of the decadent Aegean products and their wide distribution become more ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... did not attract 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

... Nationalism—an understanding between the patriotic and 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 expressed it, "see only differences of opinion and misapprehension ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... 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 ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... they are too humane; their dislike of cruelty amounts to a weakness in them. They let France escape with a paltry fine, next time France must be beaten to the dust. Always with a pleasant outward courtesy, he passed on to England. England was decadent and powerless, her rule must pass to the Germans. 'But we shall treat England rather less severely than France,' said this bland apostle of Prussian culture, 'for we wish to make it possible for ourselves to remain in friendly relations with other English-speaking peoples.' And ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh

... 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 ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler

... strong 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 - ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page

... infinite tenderness and an infinite respect. When that face faded from him, he saw all the other faces, and he saw no more difference than between sheep and sheep. Indeed, that curious love of the sordid, so common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so genuine, grew upon him, and dragged him into more and more sorry corners of a life which was never exactly "gay" to him. His father, when he died, left him in possession of an old dock, where for a time he lived in a mouldering house, in that squalid part of the East End which ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al

... obscure corner lies Mehemet Ali, the prince adventurous and chivalrous as some legendary hero, and withal one of the greatest sovereigns of modern history. There he lies behind a grating of gold, of complicated design, in that Turkish style, already decadent, but still so beautiful, which was that of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... whether they fully comprehended their own work; certainly it had no effect upon their own lives. On the other hand, an innocent, boyish young man, who lived the most correct of lives with a girlish-looking wife in an ivy-covered cottage near Barnes Common, I discovered to be the writer of decadent stories at which the Empress Theodora might have blushed. The men whose names were widest known were not the men who shone the brightest in Deleglise's kitchen; more often they appeared the dull dogs, listening enviously, or failing pathetically when they tried to compete ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... practised in its most advanced form in those suburban communities to which I have already incidentally referred at the end of the previous chapter. There a woman takes to the telephone as women in more decadent lands take to morphia. You can see her at morn at her bedroom window, pouring confidences into her telephone, thus combining the joy of an innocent vice with the healthy freshness of breeze and sunshine. It has happened to me to sit in a drawing-room, where people gathered ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett

... old 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

... statesmanship of an 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 ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... AND ITALY. (a) Why are Spain, Italy, and Turkey sometimes called "the three decadent nations of Europe"? (b) Give some account of Spain's foreign trade. (c) Give an account of the conditions that militate against Italy's prosperity as a ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various

... often urged against the anthropological method may be shortly disposed of. 'You examine savages,' people say, 'but how do you know that these savages were not once much more cultivated; that their whole mode of life, religion and all, is not debased and decadent from an earlier standard?' Mr. Muller glances at this argument, which, however, cannot serve his purpose. Mr. Muller has recognised that savage, or 'nomadic,' languages represent a much earlier state of language than anything that we find, for example, in the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... 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 ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... his day has done more to popularize the romanticism, now decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at its worst just because he was so much better than it was at its worst, because he was a poet of undeniable quality, and because he could bring to its intellectual squalor the graces and the powers which charm, though they could not avail to save ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... man who is something less and something more to her than her son. As a flush of summer lingers in autumn's face, so does a sensation of sex float in such an affection. There is something strangely tender in the yearning of the young man for the decadent charms of her whom he regards as the mother of his election, and who, at the same time, suggests to him the girl he would have loved if time had not robbed him of her youth. There is a waywardness in such an affection that ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... 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 "impossible ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... our prewar snowshoe excursions on its surface and so they equipped a vast army with this clumsy footgear and set it in motion with supplytrains on wide skis pulled by the men themselves. Russian ingenuity, boasted the Kremlin, would succeed in conquering the grass where the decadent imperialists had failed. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... 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 ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter

... retreated. The place is left to fishing folk and builders of the fishing craft, whose wharves still form the liveliest quarter. Wandering about its wide deserted courts and calli, we feel the spirit of the decadent Venetian nobility. Passages from Goldoni's and Casanova's Memoirs occur to our memory. It seems easy to realise what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... platform overhanging 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 colouring when viewed against ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... from the scum of human society. They were made up of bankrupts, decadent students, gamblers, topers, and beggars. They came from the ranks of those who had been pursued by misfortune and who bore the marks of crime. No one was too small ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... 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 extreme ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)

... only a part of the sayings of "Who's Who" regarding Rochester, Arthur Coningsby, Delamere. The last decadent descendant of a family that had been famous in long past years for its ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... 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 do not ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham

... be, in many cases, convincing, as I shall point out where necessary, but I think he carries his theory too far when he systematically excludes Egypt and puts Muzri in its place. Egypt, even in its decadent state, was a far more important power than the Arabian Muzri, and it seems unreasonable to credit it with such a limited share in the politics of the time. I cannot believe that any other power is intended in most of those passages in the Hebrew writings and Assyrian inscriptions in which the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... 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.

... new type of tragic theme. Macbeth is destroyed by vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself; Hamlet is ruined by irresoluteness and contemplative procrastination. If Othello were not overtrustful, if Lear were not decadent in senility, they would not be doomed to die in the conflict that confronts them. They fall self-ruined, self-destroyed. This second type of tragedy is less lofty and religious than the first; but it is more human, and therefore, ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... times verge upon the grotesque—we mean it in no offensive spirit. A high intelligence runs riot, and an idealism untempered by sobriety and practice, with strong passions, and love of show. But they mark a people, not decadent, but evolving. The Mexicans are at the beginning, not the end, of their civilisation; the rise, not the fall, of their life. Here is the material of a vigorous and prolific race which may be destined to bulk largely—like the whole of Spanish-America—in the future regime of the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... already over. The old Palestine Hebrew, sacrificing his sheep to Yahweh, what a granite figure compared with himself, infinitely subtle and mobile! For a century or two the modern world would take pleasure in seeing itself reflected in literature and art by its most decadent spirits, in vibrating to the pathos and picturesqueness of all the periods of man's mysterious existence on this queer little planet; while the old geocentric ethics, oddly clinging on to the changed cosmogony, would keep life clean. But all that ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... 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 sold only Tressilvain ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... Buddhism being in a decadent state in China, and the temples being in a still further state of decay, it was an easy matter to arrange things with the priests. The temple selected was a large, rambling affair, with many compounds and many rooms, situated in the heart of the city, and near the newly opened offices ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... good-nature, had permitted her decayed townswomen—at as low a rent as was compatible with prudence—to shelter themselves under her roof and as near it as possible. Her house being a profitable warren of American art-students, tempered by native journalists and decadent poets, she could, moreover, afford to let the old ladies off coffee and candles. They were at liberty to prepare their own dejeuner in winter or to buy it outside in summer; they could burn their own candles or sit in the dark, as the heart in them pleased; and thus they were as cheaply ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... 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, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... empty head. To his confused mind English literature was a period of degeneracy, one and indissoluble, in which certain famous writers lived, devoting what time they could snatch from the practice of what he called the decadent vices to the worship of the bottle. There was no harm in him. He was, as the common phrase has it, his own enemy. But he would be better employed in looking at a game of baseball than in playing with humane letters, and one cannot but regret that he should suffer thus profoundly from ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... blame for her on the doctor. His cow was friendly enough. It was Sport, the old dog, that made the heaviest and at the same time a most ludicrous item in my duties as hired man. Long past the age of sport of any kind, he spent his decadent years in a state of abject fear of thunder and lightning. If only a cloud darkened the sun, Sport kept up a ceaseless pilgrimage between his corner and the kitchen door to observe the sky, sighing most grievously at the outlook. At the first distant rumble—this was in the ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... 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

... help of their superior weapons, conquered and indeed destroyed it. And second, that even in the gorgeous picture given by the Homeric poems of the period with which they deal, there is a constant tendency to regard that period as being only the decadent and inferior heir of a civilization which had preceded it. Nothing is plainer in Homer than the suggestion that the men of the age before the Trojan Wars were greater, stronger, wiser, better in ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... entertainment of the guests there was a dance of nuptial unveiling and a bout between half-a-dozen Turkish boxers. But it was a decadent and blaze company, and something more piquant was needed for their titillation. This was supplied in the shape of an original dance by the fifteen-year-old Joseph, whom my guide describes as "graceful, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various

... Philaenis," in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... native comprehension. Compare his "Diana" of the Louvre with Cellini's in the adjoining room from the point of view of pure sculpture. Goujon's group is superb in every way. Cellini's figure is tormented and distorted by an impulse of decadent though decorative aestheticism. Goujon's caryatides and figures of the Innocents Fountain are equally sculptural in their way—by no means arabesques, as is so much of Renaissance relief, and the modern relief ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... far removed 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

... would have derived them from the conditions of life among the Germans themselves. In Franz von Sickingen and his cause Lassalle thought he saw a glimpse of the revolutionary spirit of modern times. Marx saw only a belated and futile struggle on the part of a member of the decadent medieval order of petty barons against the rising order of territorial princes. Had Lassalle linked up the cause of the petty barons with the revolt of the peasants, Marx would have thought better of his performance, but this Lassalle had neglected ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... prominently in this chapter is not due to any preoccupation with Chicago, the Commission or with vice. It is a text and nothing else. The report happens to embody what I conceive to be most of the faults of a political method now decadent. Its failure to put human impulses at the center of thought produced remedies valueless to human nature; its false interest in a particular expression of sex—vice—caused it to taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability to see that wants require fine satisfactions ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... Exile, it is difficult to see how even the art with which the tragedy of Queen Frederique's life is unfolded or the growing power of characterization displayed in her, in the loyal Merault, in the facile, decadent Christian, can make up for the lack of broadly human appeal in the general subject-matter of a book which was so sympathetically written as to appeal alike to Legitimists and to Republicans. Good as Kings in Exile is, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... I still think excellent and much that I am doubtful about; my convention is so terribly difficult that I have to put out much that pleases me, and much that I still preserve I only preserve with misgiving. I wonder if my convention is not a little too hard and too much in the style of those decadent curiosities, poems without the letter E, poems going with the alphabet and the like. And yet the idea, if rightly understood and treated as a convention always and not as an abstract principle, should not so much hamper one as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... against an England grown decadent is not justified. To admit this would be to make his task seem lighter than it really was. No doubt many of the rich aristocracy spent idle days of pleasure-seeking with the comfortable conviction that they could discharge their duties to society by merely existing, since their luxury made work ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong

... reintroduced the supernatural, which is a part of the nature of man; they described seas, and deserts, and mountains, and the emotions of the soul in loneliness. But so soon as it passed out of the hands of the greater poets, this revived Romance became as bookish as decadent Classicism, and ran into every kind of sentimental extravagance. Indeed revived Romance also became a school of manners, and by making a fashion and a code of rare emotions, debased the descriptive parts of the language. A description by any professional reporter ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh

... present war they are making use of alliances with Austria and Turkey, the two most decadent of their three historic enemies, in order to stem the onrush of Russia, their third and most powerful antagonist. They are a people ever faithful to their alliances even to the point ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood

... civilisation, and has nothing to do with the primitive reality of nature. The realistic drama begins with Euripides; and Euripides, the casuist, the friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the true decadent, an "instrument of decomposition," the slayer of art, the father of modern science), brings tragedy to an end, as he substitutes pathos for action, thought for contemplation, and passionate sentiments for the primitive ecstasy. "Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms, an optimist ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... to consider now. They had met a new race, barbarians in some ways, yet they had not forgotten the lessons they had learned; they were not decadent. Between his eon-old people and their new home stood these strange beings, a race so young that its age could readily be counted in millennia, but withal a strong, intelligent form of life. And to a race that had not known ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... 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 ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw

... myself that this was so, and the whole atmosphere of the place is pregnant with the supreme importance of this struggle, which may well be the dying convulsions of decadent France. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon

... comes decadent art. But that is of little consequence. Decadence in art is often far from ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens



Words linked to "Decadent" :   indulgent, decadency, bad person, decay, decadence



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