"Decadence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time I saw Hook was at Prior's Bank, Fulham, where his neighbors, Mr. Baylis and Mr. Whitmore, had given an "entertainment," the leading feature being an amateur play,—for which, by the way, I wrote the prologue. Hook was then in his decadence,—in broken health,—his animal spirits gone,—the cup of life drained to the dregs. It was morning before the guests departed, yet Hook remained to the last; and a light of other days brightened up his features, as he opened the piano, and began a recitative. The theme was, of course, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... I find the seventh house, in all its aspects, of a malignant influence, and every one of the planets threatening thee with disgrace, according as they stand seated towards one another, in relation to the horned signs of Aries, Taurus, and Capricorn. In the fourth house I find Jupiter in a decadence, as also in a tetragonal aspect to Saturn, associated with Mercury. Thou wilt be soundly peppered, my good, honest fellow, I warrant thee. I will be? answered Panurge. A plague rot thee, thou old fool and doting sot, how graceless ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... notwithstanding an occasional Mummius, preserved all that was of the highest value in Greek civilization, better perhaps than it would have been preserved by the tyrants and condottieri of the Greek decadence. As to a Semitic Empire, whether in the hands of Syrians or Carthaginians, with their low Semitic craft, their Moloch-worships and their crucifixions,—the very thought fills us with horror. It would have been a world-wide ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... this form of expression in any art is excessive, we may be sure that appreciation of that form of art is newly aroused. This is an interesting symptom and a good sign. To be sure, apparent intellectual youth may be the result of intellectual decadence; there is a second as well as a first childhood, but it is not difficult to distinguish between them. In general, if a large proportion of those in a community who like to look at pictures, prefer such as "tell a story," this fact, if the number of the appreciative is at the same ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... affected by an inanimate thing with so strong a sense of disquiet. He had pictured an old stone tower on a bright headland; he found instead this raw thing among trees. The decadence of the brand-new repels as something against nature, and this new thing was decadent. But there was a mysterious life in it, for though not a chimney smoked, it seemed to enshrine a personality and to wear a sinister aura. He felt a lively distaste, ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... depicting the life of bawds. Some of the signatories were among the greatest names in contemporary literature, or the most austere of critics. A domestic poet, bourgeois and a Catholic, gave his blessing as an artist to a detailed description of the decadence of the Greeks. There were enthusiastic praises of novels in which the course of Lewdness was followed through the ages: Rome, Alexandria, Byzantium, the Italian and French Renaissance, the Age of Greatness ... Nothing was omitted. Another cycle of studies was devoted to the various ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... respect to London, in magnifying it into a town of superlative commercial splendour in the days of Nero, which, I repeat, is wildly ridiculous, he more grossly erred with respect to our form of government; for when he decried it, and prophesied its decadence and downfall, his sagacity ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the northwest coast of Borneo would convince any observer of the ease with which these objects might be effected; for the native government, being in a state of decadence, requires protection, and would willingly act justly toward traders and capitalists, and encourage their enterprises, in order to continue on friendly terms with any European power located in their vicinity. The numerous rivers on the coast, with their local ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... together, reading and re-reading them, can we suppose that they were composed by the great delineator, of or toward a person under or much below thirty? They imply that the person addressed was not so far below middle life that a statement of the decadence that would come after his fortieth year presented a remote or far-off picture. Besides, if his friend was below thirty years, while it might be well to urge him to marry, hardly would the poet have used language implying that his marrying days ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... said Madame de Stael; and what more sure support in the decadence which threatens us, than a positive science deduced from irrefragable law! I say irrefragable with conviction. Though human laws be subject to change, the laws of nature are shown to be immutable, at least so far as the observations of learned men of all ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... stalls, one of which was golden, and the other three silver-gilt! Such knowledge was always pleasant to me! A golden stall! How sweet is the sound thereof to church-loving ears! But bishops have been shorn of their beauty, and deans are in their decadence. A utilitarian age requires the fatness of the ecclesiastical land, in order that it may be divided out into small portions of provender, on which necessary working clergymen may live,—into portions so infinitesimally small that working clergymen can hardly live. And the full-blown ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... to gaze once more on the blue hills," to the girl in the booking-office, when what he really wanted was a ticket (of a light heliotrope colour) to St. James's Park. Lord BYRON, on the other hand, composed a sorrowful ditty on the decadence of the Isles of Greece whilst shaving; but the invention of the safety-razor and the energetic action of M. VENIZELOS will most likely render it unnecessary for anyone to repeat such a performance. As for the people who have a sudden bright idea whilst they are dressing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... development, and is especially apt to be found among the nature peoples after the white man has visited them and demoralized their family life. But in all these cases the existence of promiscuity is manifestly something exceptional and abnormal. Perhaps civilized peoples such as the Romans of the decadence have more nearly approximated the condition of promiscuity than any savage people of which we have knowledge. At any rate, one must conclude that the lowest existing savages found in the nineteenth ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... world has ever seen—the civilization which still gives us the inexhaustible wells of our intellectual life—what was it that made it the shortest-lived? Few, I think, would deny that the rapid decadence of Greece, despite her splendid intellectual life, was due to moral causes. Not the pure, but the impure—the brilliant Hetairae—were the companions of men, and the men themselves were stained with nameless vices. Speaking of the decay of the Athenian people, Mr. Francis Galton says: "We know, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... said, and Jane smiled on, yet waited most acceptably and kept all things decently and in order—for a little while. Along about Christmas-time a further decadence and additional flaw in the jewel was discovered, and it was Perkins himself who discovered it. It happened one day while he was at work alone in the house, Mrs. Perkins having gone out shopping. A friend from Boston appeared—a ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... were not artists began to imitate it. If no one prized art, why should sham art have come into existence? According to him it was the sham that made men aware of the true; yet the sham could not exist until men were aware of the true. But the account he gives of the decadence of art is historically untrue as well as unintelligible. We know little of the primitive artist; but we have no proof that he was utterly different from other men, or that they did not enjoy his ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Bonpo sect still possessed numerous and wealthy Vihars (or abbeys) in Tibet. But from the information of the Catholic missionaries in Eastern Tibet, who have come into closest contact with the sect, it appears to be now in a state of great decadence, "oppressed by the Lamas of other sects, the Peunbo (Bonpo) think only of shaking off the yoke, and getting deliverance from the vexations which the smallness of their number forces them to endure." In June, 1863, apparently from such despairing motives, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... affluent artistic faculty was but the open sign of a crowded life, loyal throughout to the great causes, high ideals, and, let us add, the early friendships, chosen long ago in the mid century. We are now at that century's end,—an end not without its reproach, as expressed by a decadence more self-conscious than dignified, more critical than creative; but in Lord Leighton's Art there was little diminution in his active energy, and of that finer health and spirit of life, which is behind all beauty! Like his distinguished friend ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... la mere," he said to himself, at the close of that half hour's meditations; "she is really very nice, and the position altogether advantageous, perhaps as much as one has the right to expect in the general decadence of things. But, good heavens, how lovely that girl is! She is the first woman who ever looked me in the face and told me she disliked me; the first woman who ever gave me contemptuous looks and scornful words. And ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... and unprofitable" months of his whole life; and was, he said, as willing to disclaim the university for a mother, as she could be to renounce him for a son. Oxford, as judged by these men, was remarkable as an illustration of the spiritual and intellectual decadence of a body which at other times has been a centre of great movements of thought. Johnson, though his experience was rougher than any of the three, loved Oxford as though she had not been a harsh stepmother to his youth. Sir, he said fondly of his college, "we are a nest ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... home with his visitors, and thence to a Lyceum which had been established in the Herrick School District, where a debate was in progress as to the relative importance, in a humanitarian point of view, of the bondage of the African race in the Southern States, or the decadence of the Indian tribes under the encroachments of the Whites. The "question" assumed that the Aborigines were most worthy of sympathy; and young Glazier, being invited to participate in the discussion, accepted, and spoke upon the negative ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... out and migrated to this place four or five centuries ago. Briefly, they look something like Jews, practise a very debased form of the Jewish religion, are civilized and clever after a fashion, but in the last stage of decadence from interbreeding—about nine thousand men is their total fighting force, although three or four generations ago they had twenty thousand—and live in hourly terror of extermination by the surrounding Fung, who hold them in hereditary hate as the possessors of the wonderful mountain ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... beginning to shed a monastic tint over the face of Rose Cormon, who now saw with something like despair her white skin assuming the yellow tones which proclaim maturity. A slight down on her upper lip, about the corners, began to spread and darken like a trail of smoke; her temples grew shiny; decadence was beginning! It was authentic in Alencon that Mademoiselle Cormon suffered from rush of blood to the head. She confided her ills to the Chevalier de Valois, enumerating her foot-baths, and consulting him as to refrigerants. On such occasions the shrewd old gentleman would pull out his ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... republic of the Mamelukes in Egypt would have afforded M. de Montesquieu (see Considerations sur la Grandeur et la Decadence des Romains, c. 16) a juster ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... by this time, however, was well established in the homes as a breakfast and dinner beverage, and such consumption more than made up for any loss sustained through the gradual decadence of the coffee house. Yet signs of the change in national taste that arrived with the Georges were not wanting; for the active propaganda of the British East India Company was fairly well launched during Queen ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the best you can say of him is bad enough. He squandered his own fortune first—on Esther Levenson and the production of "The Sunken City"—and then stole ruthlessly from Dagmar; that is, until she found legal ways to put a stop to it. We had passed into Edward's reign and the decadence which ended in the war had already set in—Grimshaw was the last of the "pomegranate school," the first of the bolder, more sinister futurists. A frank hedonist. An intellectual voluptuary. He set the pace, and a whole tribe of idolaters and imitators panted at his heels. They copied his yellow ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... no tendency, except that of his own Titanic genius. He could see white and he could see black, but he could not see grey, and never tried to paint it. He does not allow Philip II even his redeeming virtues of indefatigable industry and unceasing devotion to duty, while in his Rome of the decadence would assuredly be found scarce five good men. His vision is curiously limited to the darker side of history; he hears humanity uttering in all ages a cry of suffering, and but rarely a shout of laughter. He sees ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... occupies with its garden the whole space between the market-place and Church Square. But though the house enjoys the privilege of a large garden,—so large that the land being in the middle of a town would be of great value were it not that Dillsborough is in its decadence,—still it stands flush up to the street upon which the front door opens. It has an imposing flight of stone steps guarded by iron rails leading up to it, and on each side of the door there is a row of three windows, and on the two upper ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... will judge how he has done it, and it is to be hoped that Germany will give him his just reward, for no punishment could be more fitting. The rest of the world already knows his vacuity, his utter uselessness, his criminal decadence. As his father was stripped of the Garter, so is he here shown stripped of the attributes to which, in earlier days, he made false claim. There remains a foolish knave posturing—and that is the real Crown ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... unscholarly version of that masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding's rendering of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hicke's masterly rendering of Lucian's True History? But eternal life means endless change and in nothing is this truth more strikingly manifest than in the growth and decadence of living languages and in the translation of dead tongues into the ever changing tissue of the living. Were it not for this, no translation worthy of the name would ever stand in need of revision, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... literally every fact and every date, but he also knew personally most of the great men who had latterly played leading parts. On English politics it was characteristic of the man to have a tremendous belief in the present. For instance, I said something about the decadence of Parliament and Parliamentary speaking. He at once burst out: 'You are quite wrong. The men of to-day are much greater than their predecessors'; and then he went through all our prominent politicians and compared them with the men of the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... been able, and probably it is impossible, to define madness, or to give a clearly marked indication of the boundary line between sanity and insanity. Mental soundness is merged in unsoundness by degrees of decadence which are so small as to be practically inappreciable. It is with the mind-state which precedes the development of recognized form of insanity the therapeutist and the social philosopher are chiefly interested. Although in individual cases the subject of mental derangement may, as ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... very little writing in prose until the era of their decadence, and showed little instinct to use the concise and unified form of the short-story. The conquering Romans followed closely in the paths of their predecessors and did little work in the shorter narratives. The myths of Greece and Rome were ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... dated man's decadence from the moment when he began to "poor-fellow" irreclaimable savagery on ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... of the dead; of the terrible invasions of barbarous Nahua tribes; of the destruction, at their hands, of the beautiful metropolis Chichen-Itza, the centre of civilization, the emporium of the countries comprised between the eastern shores of Mayapan and the western of Xibalba; of the subsequent decadence of the nations; of their internal strife during long ages. For here, in reckoning time, we must not count by centuries but millenaries. We do not, in thus speaking, indulge in conjectures—for, verily, the study of the walls leaves no room for supposition ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... discontented masses writhe in their despair and seek redress! What wonder that Nihilism should flourish and the service of dynamite be enlisted to accomplish what moral suasion failed to achieve! The years beginning with 1879 were disastrous for Russia. They marked the decadence of those reforms which ten years before had given promise of ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... Napoleon's anger did not last long, although his distrust remained fixed. Talleyrand's pride underwent numerous eclipses. Commencing, however, from that day, the separation between them became irreparable; and when the emperor's decadence began, Talleyrand was already gained over to other hopes, and ready to ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... decadence was in progress in England, which Alfred's wise reign was powerless to arrest, and which his greatness may even have tended to hasten. The distance between the king and the people had widened from a mere step ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... have deliberately repeated it all, not only in offset to Carlyle' s everlurking pessimism and world-decadence, but as presenting the most thoroughly American points of view I know. In my opinion the above formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New World democracy in the creative realms of time and space. There is that about them which ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... brushes of special pattern. Here one can find again his meticulous spirit. He has many of the qualities of the scientist; he is as much chemist as painter. It has been said of him, that he was a great artist of the decadence. This is materially inexact, since his qualities of draughtsmanship are those of a superb Classicist, and his colouring of very pure taste. But the spirit of his work, his love of exact detail, his exaggerated psychological refinement, are certainly the ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... of machine-made furniture came cheap imitations of antiques and the rapid decadence of this art. Hand-made reproductions are quite another thing. Sir Richard Wallace (of the Wallace Collection, London) is said to have given $40,000 for a reproduction ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... been more striking. The soft, delicate, well-groomed figure of Blanch, the accomplished woman of the world, with eyes intoxicating as wine and a glowing wealth of golden hair, tempting and alluring as the luxuriance of old Rome at the height of her triumphs before her decadence set in—the last fair breath of her ancient glory—the best and fairest that modern civilization had produced. She had no need of the artificial head-gear and upholstery with which the modern society belle is wont to bolster up herself. There ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... out into resounding lamentations over the decadence and decline of taste, and slip in eulogies of Messieurs Etienne Jouy, Tissot, Gosse, Duval, Jay, Benjamin Constant, Aignan, Baour-Lormian, Villemain, and the whole Liberal-Bonapartist chorus who patronize Vernou's paper. Next you draw a picture of that glorious phalanx of writers ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... simplicity and directness, in the "Various Epistles". It must be regarded as a misfortune for Theodoric that his maxims of statesmanship, which were assuredly full of manly sense and vigour, should have reached us only in such a shape, diluted with the platitudes and false rhetoric of a scholar of the decadence. Still, even through all these disguises, it is easy to discern the genuine patriotism both of the great King and of his minister, their earnest desire that right, not might, should determine every case that ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... attended Sam Jones' recent services at Austin. He is simply a product of the evil times upon which the church has fallen. In religion, as in art and letters, decadence is marked by sensationalism. The trouble with Sam is that he mistakes himself for me—thinks he has been called to judge the world. I was pained to hear him consign about fifteen different classes ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... together this batch, written when the first novelty of the novels was long over, and before there was any decadence, one obtains, as well perhaps as from any other division of his works, an idea of their author's miraculous power. Many novelists since have written as much or more in the same time. But their books ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... it is focused by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... reproved the supineness and stupidity of the Crown Prince. Lamenting the departed puissance of the sons of Tongatabu, I warmed to my subject, telling this savage who looked at me with so neutral a countenance how much I deplored the decadence of his race. I bade him think of the time when the Tongans, in token of magnanimous amity, rubbed noses with the white man, and of where those noses were now—between the fingers of the Caucasian. He appeared ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... term Renascence cannot be applied to the movement that asserted itself in Hebrew literature at the end of the fifteenth century, as little as the term Decadence can be applied ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... his. It was an interesting study. The conclusion of the process was so inevitable. The time came when he did not pass my house. Then he took the sunlight in a bow-window on the second floor of his residence. So closely had I watched his decadence during the six years that I was able to say to myself one morning, 'There will be crape on his door before the day is out.' And ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... The last stages of the Cretaceous are marked by a decadence of the reptiles. By the end of that period the reptilian forms characteristic of the time had become extinct one after another, leaving to represent the class only the types of reptiles which continue to modern times. The day of the ammonite and the belemnite also now drew to a close, and only a ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... instead of looking the prelate in the face, cast down his eyes in gloomy bewilderment. The patriarch appeared not to observe the young man's repulsion and clasped his hand warmly. Then he changed the subject, speaking of the grieving widow, of the decadence of Memphis, of Orion's plans for the future, and finally of the gems dedicated to the Church by the deceased Mukaukas. The dialogue had taken a calm, conversational tone; the patriarch was sitting in the dead man's arm-chair, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in the former he learned to know and to love a whole school. The two brothers, Stephen and Oliver Greenfield, and Wraysford, and Pembury, and Loman stand out with strong personality and distinctness; and especially admirable is the art with which is depicted the gradual decadence of character in Loman, step by step, entangled in a maze of lies, and degraded by vice until ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... dictation, of none; when his existence was a round of joysome light-heartedness, and he, a stranger to constraint—this habitation of the Indian, to my mind, emphasizes his melancholy, and, perhaps, inevitable decadence, rather than symbolizes his partnership with the white in the more palpable pursuits of a practical, enlightened, and energetic age, or co-activity with him on a theatre of enlarged and more vigorous action. It is ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... dissipation and excess, and ever hope to make up their losses by rigid surveillance in later years." "The sins of youth are expiated in age," is a proverb which daily examples illustrate. In proportion as puberty is precocious, will decadence be premature; the excesses of middle life draw heavily on the fortune of later years. "The mill of the gods grinds slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine," and though nature may be a tardy creditor, she is found at last to be ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... judgments fall short of acuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. It needs but a quickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional centre of its respect, to rise from even the appearance of decadence. There is a new quality seeking expression in England like the rising of sap in the spring, a new generation asking only for such leadership and such emancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a King alone can ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Bates, suddenly; "are you the woman who read about the Decadence of the Renaissance Forms at ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... he had seen her occasionally, at supper in smart restaurants, at first nights, riding in the Park. Now, as he looked at her name, he realized that he had not even seen her for a long time, perhaps for a couple of years. He had heard the rumours of her decadence, and taken little heed of them, not being specially interested in her. Nevertheless, this morning, as he shut up his book and got up to go downstairs to his work, he was aware of a desire to hear the ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... itself true vitality must ever be the leader and the creator of the popular taste; only when it falls into decadence does it become ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Europe is threatened with decadence more owing to the Peace Treaties than as a result of the War. She is in a state of daily increasing decline, and the causes of dissatisfaction are ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... long list of infant mortality. M. Leroy-Beaulieu had described years before the practical extinction of the family and the government interference[34] brought about by the discoveries made by the government inspecting committee, upon whom consternation seized as they found decadence of morals, enfeebled physique, and that the ordinary girl-worker at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, or make a broth, or care for a child's needs or the simplest demands of a home. Appalled at these conditions, France set about the organization of industrial schools, and ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... races. On these and other grounds it is now held with growing certainty that fetishism cannot be the original form of religion, and that the higher stages of it are not to be derived from that one. The races among whom fetishism is found exhibit a well-known feature of the decadence of religion, namely that the great god or gods have grown weak and faint, and smaller gods and spirits have crowded in to fill up the blank thus caused. Worship is transferred from the great beings who are the original gods of the tribe ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Rashi and the Biblical Movement in France—The Commentary on the Pentateuch by Samuel ben Meir-His Disciples-Joseph Kara and Joseph Bekor-Shor-Their Rational Exegesis-Decadence of Biblical Exegesis-The Tossafot on the Pentateuch; Chief Collections; their Character-Rashi and Christian Exegesis- Nicholas de Lyra and Luther-Decadence of French Judaism from the Expulsion of 1181 to ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... continued, "that before sailing you had expressed the hope that something really exciting and adventurous would befall the party—that you were tired of the monotonous humdrum of twentieth-century existence—that you regretted the decadence of piracy, and the expunging of romance from ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... at each other, their faces gravely troubled, aghast, as though they had glimpsed the end of civilized society, as though they felt that they had lived too long into an age of decadence and open shame. Constance's face showed despair—she might have been about to be pitched into the gutter without a friend and without a shilling—but Sophia's had the reckless courage that ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... all over!" she said—"How tired I am of that phrase! She knows as well as anybody that Roxmouth, for all his airs of aristocratic propriety, is a social villain of the lowest type of modern decadence, yet she would rather see me married to him than to any other man she has ever met. And why? Simply because he will be a Duke! She would like to say to all her acquaintances—'My niece is a Duchess.' She would feel a certain fantastic satisfaction in thinking that her millions were ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... discovered how grotesque and ignorant this play-and-book idea was. She had returned from her honeymoon in November of the first year of the war and had been astonished to find that nearly all the well-known women whose names, in the public imagination, were associated with decadence and irresponsibility, were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Cross work and allied war charities; that the majority of the men who were popularly supposed to be killing time with ingenious wickedness worked as hard as the average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantes ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... of existence as a nation, even though Tehran, and Meshed, and Shiraz were to share the fate of Persepolis and Susa, it would yet remain as a portrait of unrivalled humour and accuracy of a people who, though now in their decadence, have played an immense and still play a not wholly insignificant part in the complex drama of Asiatic politics. It is the picture of a people, light-hearted, nimble-witted, and volatile, but subtle, hypocritical, and insincere; metaphysicians and casuists, courtiers and rogues, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... the Ku K'ai-chih makes it clear that the art of this period (fifth to eighth centuries), was a typical primitive movement. To call the great vital art of the Liang, Chen, Wei, and Tang dynasties a development out of the exquisitely refined and exhausted art of the Han decadence—from which Ku K'ai-chih is a delicate straggler—is to call Romanesque sculpture a development out of Praxiteles. Between the two some thing has happened to refill the stream of art. What had happened in China was the spiritual and ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... The decadence of native Judaism in France has become proverbial. The original French Jews never amounted to much; and the Alsatian immigrants, while still supplying rabbis for the pulpits, have of late begun to disappear from the pews. You may state it is an axiom that the synagogue ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. "Brother," said Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a teakettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and water, and attempts to enter into conversation with the company about ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... from the town of Elberfeld, Prussia, he can better understand the gravity of the problem which weighed upon his mind, as upon that of so many others. Must we admit, it was asked, that the Council of the Vatican has affixed its seal upon the decadence of Catholicity, binding the Church to the failing fortunes of the Latin races? Must Protestantism finally triumph with the Saxon races? And here Father Hecker's faith did not halt an instant, but grasped the difficulty in all its terrible magnitude. His solution ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the French court to the republic of Venice. In his Histoire du gouvernement de Venise he undertook to explain, and above all to criticize, the administration of that republic, and to expose the causes of its decadence. The work was printed by the king's printer and dedicated to Louvois, which points to the probability that the government did not disapprove of it. It appeared in March 1676, and provoked a warm protest from the Venetian ambassador, Giustiniani. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave. Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them, professionals to dance for them, and a ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... found all his needed confirmations; the analyst from this material formed the due equation of high birth; the philosopher traced the course of aristocracy, from its primeval rise in crude strength or subtlety, through centuries of power, to picturesque decadence, and the beginnings of its last stand. Even the artist might here, perchance, have seized on the dry ineffable pervading spirit, as one visiting an old cathedral seems to scent out the constriction of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... rambling, sway-backed tunnels are very attractive things, with their alcoved outlooks upon the lovely and inspiriting water. They contain two or three hundred queer old pictures, by old Swiss masters—old boss sign-painters, who flourished before the decadence ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... make the mistake of confusing conservatism and decadence. That the city will in many particulars always progress more rapidly than the country is inevitable. But speed is not the ultimate criterion of a full life. Again must we apply the test whether the gain is relative or essential. Telephones, free mail delivery, ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... things propitious reign! Upon the ornamented beam will settle at the close of spring the fragrant dust! Your reckless indulgence of licentious love and your naturally moonlike face will soon be the source of the ruin of a family. The decadence of the family estate will emanate entirely from Ching; while the wane of the family affairs will be entirely attributable to the fault of Ning! Licentious love will be the main ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... more alive, much more keen about everything, even a fight, or above all a fight, if they thought a fight would clear the air. Those clever young men, self-appointed historians of a period they know only by hearsay, may deplore or envy its decadence. But because a small clique wrote anaemic verse and bragged of the vices for which they had not the strength, because a few youthful artists invented new methods of expression the outsider did not understand, that does not mean ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... book the first reading, and it is well if it gets a chance of a second." From him "Pride and Prejudice" got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the "Quarterly Review," "we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the Australians, I take it, is no lower than was that of any race (no matter how intellectual it may be at the present time) at one period of its history. All races have a tendency toward psychical development under favorable surroundings; it has been a progress instead of a decadence, a rise instead of a fall! Evolution has not ceased; nor will it end until Finis is written at the bottom ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... this scene to-night, every 'crack' ball this winter will be, not the pleasant society of men and women, but—even in this young country—an orgie such as rotting Corinth saw, a frenzied festival of Rome in its decadence." ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... Andreas Doederlein was sitting at the table in the musicians' waiting room. He looked like Emperor Barbarossa in Kyffhaeuser. He had well founded reason to express his contempt for the decadence and impiety of the youth of to-day. It was superfluous for him to remark that a man who would conduct himself as Daniel had done should be eliminated from the ranks of those who lay claim to the ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... a nation to greatness and the causes which contribute to its decline. The study made at this point of view detached itself from the more comprehensive work which he had undertaken, and in 1734 appeared his Considerations sur les Causes de la Grandeur et de la Decadence des Romains. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... so that, indeed, Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been born a Bellingham.... But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital aspirations ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the nineteenth century the formal garden was practically abandoned in France. It was the period of the real decadence of the formal garden. This came not from one cause alone but from many. To the straight lines and gentle curves of former generations upon generations of French gardens were added sinuosities as varied and complicated as those of ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... term "lake party" had a distinct social significance, and the word "picnic," which came later to be used to describe the same thing, meant to the elder inhabitants an affair that had quite lost the flavor of the older custom, and the use of the word was regarded as one of the signs of social decadence. ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... sounded on the stage, and the unhappy singer, bereft of romance, his career finished, decadence and old age staring him in the face, went to answer the call. But suddenly his face changed; a brightness, an alertness came into it and even, mysteriously, into all his body. There was a woman at the other end of the wire, and she was young and pretty, and she was asking him ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... is hopelessly abased. The mass perceives too late in rare individuals certain wasted talents—treasures of sagacity, spiritual vigor, heroic and almost supernatural comprehension. Such men are prodigious exceptions in times of material decadence and mental laxness. They inherit all the qualities that have long since ceased to be current. They serve as examples and rallying points for other generations, more clear-sighted and less degenerate. ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... flight, it rose aloft and soared towards heaven, but alas! its wings, like those of Icarus, melted in the sun and it fell to earth again. Instead of wax it needed the strong "eagle pinions of faith" which revelation only can supply. The decadence is strongly marked both in the Epicurean and Stoic schools. They both express the feeling of exhaustion, disappointment, and despair. The popular theology had lost its hold upon the public mind. The ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... very immoral," Lord Henry murmured. "It is the motto of decadence. It means that the moment the Union Jack is unfurled, the voice of criticism, the intellect, and the first principles of justice and honest ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... of the decay of the Border, the ruined Laird, the frivolous foolish society of the Well, taking the place of sturdy William of Deloraine, and farmers like Scott's grandfather, makes a picture of decadence as melancholy as "Redgauntlet." "Not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee!" Strangely enough, among the features of the time, Scott mentions reckless borrowings, "accommodation," "Banks of Air." His own business was based on a "Bank of Air," "wind-capital," ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... responsible for another attempt, viz., the infallibility of her ministers, a promising enough plan, but ill regulated. The Stuart regime, urging with unpleasant vigour the divinity of kingship and the corresponding caddishness (or decadence) of much of the rest of mankind, is a signal example of how my plan should not be carried out. Carlyle's heroes are ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... of a lofty but expiring family tree. The Penwicks had come over in the Mayflower, or at a period yet more remote, and the acme of the prosperity and social distinction of the name was coincident with the second administration of President Washington. Since that time its decadence had been steady; at first slow, but later with the accelerating motion common to falling bodies, until nothing remained of the family revenues, little but a tradition of the family greatness, and none of the race but this frostbitten old lady, poor and ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... she should govern other people is an anachronism. This idea, which I have heard voiced all over Germany, was aptly set forth before the war by a speaker on "The Decadence of the British Empire," when he sought to prove such decadence by citing the fact that there was only one British soldier to every 4,000 of the people of India. "Why," he concluded, "Germany has more soldiers in Alsace-Lorraine alone than ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... newspaper press has sounded of late years, again and again, the note of alarm, dwelling in scathing articles on signs of decadence in the nation's whilom pride,—the army. It has pointed out the growing spirit of luxury in its ranks, the wholesale abuse of power by the officers and sergeants, the looseness of discipline, the havoc wrought by "army usurers," the "money marriages," ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... these qualities. The perception of the enlightened man will then be the task of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of work in any stage from immaturity to decadence by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the main, free from the abuses and miseries of the stage in English-speaking lands, and, above all, from that all-pervading lubricity and pornographic stench which have made the French theater of the last half of the nineteenth century a main cause in the decadence of the French people. In most German towns of importance one finds the drama a part of the daily life of its citizens—ennobling in its higher ranges, and in ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... Aegean remains have become astonishingly uniform over the whole area; the local ceramic developments have almost ceased and been replaced by ware of one general type both of fabric and decoration. The Cretans have stayed their previous decadence, and are once more possessors of a progressive civilization. They have developed a more convenient and expressive written character by stages of which one is best represented by the tablets of Hagia Triada. The art of all the area gives evidence ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... be taken into consideration along with chinquapin questions. According to authorities on the subject of decadence, we do not care very much about the children in these days. If some old-fashioned folks still remain, and if these old-fashioned folks do not take any particular personal interest in the beautiful garden and lawn ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... his insignificant, eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers of cheap "objects ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... long leap from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, taking us from a period of genuine religious fervor in art, into an age of artificial imitation. In the midst of the decadence of old ideals and the birth of art methods entirely new, arose one who seemed to be the reincarnation of the old spirit in a form peculiar to his age and race. This was Murillo, the peasant-painter of Spain, than whom was never artist more pious, not even excepting the angelic brother of San ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... a little, and not wholly for Venice. He was an embodiment of that late time of Venetian culture when its magnificence, its artistic and intellectual development had touched their height, and the hint of decadence shadowed its splendor with a pathos unguessed ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the Brents had been something similar, but showing the causes of decadence in their aristocratic and not their plebeian forms. They, too, had sent their shoots to the wars; but their positions had been different and they had often attained honour—for without flaw they were gallant, and brave deeds were done by them ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... the Puritans and the Quakers, have endeavored to exclude the arts from religion, lest they should contaminate it. But the exclusion has been accomplished with difficulty, and to maintain it has been impossible. It is neither an accident, nor a sign of decadence, that painting and sculpture are creeping back into the Protestant churches, to combine with poetry and music in expressing the religious life of man. For the intellect alone is inadequate either to express that life as it exists, or to call it into existence ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... events, we know that he was not unjust to the average of his contemporaries, by the evidence of the men's own plays. We know that the decadence of the stage of which he complains went on uninterruptedly after his time, and in the very ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... MacHenery agreed, smiling and fitting his fingertips together. "Now attend my simile, Captain. Unlike those feathered Romans of the Decadence, we moderns settle for one meal at a sitting, and let it digest in peace. We have instead our more sophisticated greeds, whetted by subtle persuasions and an assurance that it's really quite moral to ransom our future for ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... statuaries make fewer images of foxes. Year by year fewer victims of fox-possession are taken to the hospitals to be treated according to the best scientific methods by Japanese physicians who speak German. The cause is not to be found in the decadence of the old faiths: a superstition outlives a religion. Much less is it to be sought for in the efforts of proselytising missionaries from the West—most of whom profess an earnest belief in devils. It is purely educational. The omnipotent enemy ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... in the dissection of the mind, the outward signs seem to have been forgotten. In her, as yet, there is no symptom whatever of that weariness of mind which, when felt by the reader, induces him to declare that the author has written himself out. It is not from decadence that we do not have another Mrs. Poyser, but because the author soars to things which seem to her to be ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... of China had become unprogressive, and had ceased to produce much of value in the way of art and literature. This was not due, I think, to any decadence in the race, but merely to lack of new material. The influx of Western knowledge provides just the stimulus that was needed. Chinese students are able and extraordinarily keen. Higher education suffers from lack of funds and absence of libraries, but does not suffer from ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... civilization is strained the most, where it is nearest to the breaking point, namely, to our industrial and political order. Let us ask ourselves if we do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnant there. That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, that we see obvious political decadence on the one hand, and a determination to experiment with fresh governmental processes on the other, few would deny. It would appear to me that in both cases the revolt and the decadence are due to that fierce, short creed of rebellion against humane no less than religious standards, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... pleasure, Madame de Pompadour, can only be spoken of with modified approval. Her great fault was that she did not check the decadence of taste and sense in the art of bookbinding. In her time came in the habit of binding books (if binding it can be called) with flat backs, without the nerves and sinews that are of the very essence of book-covers. Without these ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is the history of the long ...
— Progress and History • Various
... dream-life touches that childish condition of the intelligence which marks the decadence of old age and the encroachments of mental disease. The parallelism between dreams and insanity has been pointed out by most writers on the subject. Kant observed that the madman is a dreamer awake, and more recently ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... the law of Nature—that is, the law of God—that all that is destructible shall be destroyed. When that which is immortal buries itself in the destructible—when it receives all the messages from without, through the surrounding region of decadence, and none from within, from the eternal doors—it cannot, though immortal still, know its own immortality. The destructible must be burned out of it, or begin to be burned out of it, before it can partake of eternal life. When that is all burnt away and gone, then ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... close of the great series of tragedies of blood and revenge, in which "The Spanish Tragedy" and "Hamlet" are landmarks, but before decadence can fairly be said to have set in. He, indeed, loads his scene with horrors almost past the point which modern taste can bear; but the intensity of his dramatic situations, and his superb power of flashing in a single line a light into the recesses of the human heart at the crises of supreme ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... unencumbered with books. You will find in Plato much about reciters, actors, poets, rhetoricians, pleaders, sophists, public orators and refiners of language, but very little indeed about books. Even the library of Alexandria grew in a time of decadence and belonged to an age not his. Says ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Young Toryism, but they told him that they did not now wish to hear him. They had taken Robinson's measure very quickly. "Police-court lawyer!" they said, and ceased to trouble about him. Mr. Balfour never attended the group, but they consoled themselves to some extent by reading his book on Decadence and arguing about it among themselves. If, however, they were not able to secure many of the Eminent Ones, they were able to secure plenty of the Semi-Eminent, far more than they wanted, and for half a year, they listened to politicians of all sorts, Old Tories and Young ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... on the brilliant flower background; and the boyish slightness of her figure led John to think of a statuette done in a period of Greek decadence. 'Others,' he thought, 'would only see her as a somewhat too thin example of English maidenhood. I see her quite differently.' And when her two tame rooks alighted at her ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... detriment, delaceration|, outrage, havoc, inroad, ravage, scath[obs3]; perversion, prostitution, vitiation, discoloration, oxidation, pollution, defoedation|, poisoning, venenation|, leaven, contamination, canker, corruption, adulteration, alloy. decline, declension, declination; decadence, decadency[obs3]; falling off &c. v.; caducity[obs3], decrepitude. decay, dilapidation, ravages of time, wear and tear; corrosion, erosion; moldiness, rottenness; moth and rust, dry rot, blight, marasmus[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... historic sights, and exhausted them all, real and alleged, in less than half a day (for in addition to a lust for ready-cut building stone the Turks have never cherished monuments that might accentuate their own decadence). After that we fossicked in the manner of prospectors that we are by preference, if not always by trade, eschewing polite society and hunting in the impolite, amusing places where most of the facts have teeth, sharp and ready ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... discovering one in each of the two branches into which the fiord divides. Neither of these glaciers quite reaches tide-water. Notwithstanding the apparent fruitfulness of their fountains, they are in the first stage of decadence, the waste from melting and evaporation being greater now than the supply of new ice from their snowy fountains. We reached the one in the north branch, climbed over its wrinkled brow, and gained a good view of the trunk and some of the tributaries, and also of the sublime ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... Mohammedanism. He points out that the language is the popular or vulgar dialect, differing widely from the classical and literary; that it contains many words in common modern use and that generally it suggests the decadence of Arabian literature. Of one tale he remarks:—The History of the loves of Camaralzaman and Budour, Princess of China, is no more Indian or Persian than the others. The prince's father has Moslems for subjects, his mother is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humour itself,—the smile of philosophy. All genuine humourists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers, Thackeray, for instance, and of course, Shakespeare. The poets of the Decadence (when was not the world in decadence?), in their protests against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the way to Teaism. Perhaps nowadays it is our demure contemplation of the Imperfect that the West and the East can meet in ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... completely misleading, the inward condition of the class in question is this. However calm the outer surface of their lives may seem, under the surface there is a continual discord; and also, though they alone may perceive it, a continued decadence. In various degrees they all yield to temptation; all men in the vigour of their manhood do; and conscience still fills them with its old monitions and reproaches. But it cannot enforce obedience. ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... world, the gems of current thought and information, digest them carefully, and pour them forth, in attractive form, for their delectation on Sunday. As a sort of oratorical and poetical reviewer, essayist and rhapsodist, the parson and his church had survived the decadence of religion. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... a usual caution, I lamented to my friend F—— of the neglect in which readers held me, to which the above experience in a library was a rare exception. F—— offered me such consolation as he could, deplored the general taste and the decadence of the times, and said that as praise was sweet to everyone, he, as far as he himself was able, offered it anonymously to those who merited it. He was standing recently in a picture gallery, when a long-haired man ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... together,—roofed edifice, with revenues and belfries; pulpit, reading-desk, with Books and Methods: possibility, in short, and strict prescription, That a man stand there and speak of spiritual things to men. It is beautiful;—even in its great obscuration and decadence, it is among the beautifulest, most touching objects one sees on the Earth. This Speaking Man has indeed, in these times, wandered terribly from the point; has, alas, as it were, totally lost sight of the point: yet, at bottom, whom have we to compare with him? Of all public ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... is abroad, though one of great unrest, is not one of decadence, but of progress. But it would be folly not to admit that there are aspects of it which presage disaster unless directed, just as the pot will boil ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... with exuberant suddenness, and Napoleon rushed into domestic tranquillity. The zealot of freedom forthwith concentrated his wondrous talents with aggressive righteousness on the task of destroying a decadence that was bearing France to her doom. Josephine was enrolled as patron of deliverance from anarchy, and having all the essential attributes which make for success in such an enterprise, she daily filled her ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... the Period. There are many points of view from which to study the conditions existing at the close of this period. But for our purpose it will probably suffice to consider (1) some signs of decadence or defects; (2) some hopeful signs. The facts touching these matters are to be gathered not only from secular history but from the life and work of Jesus as they are seen at work either for or against the progress of his work. (1) Unpropitious conditions. Among the signs of decadence or errors ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... his history of Averros shows how much of this prosperity and intellectual pre-eminence was due to the Jews. The cruel edicts of Philip Augustus against the race proved no less disastrous here than the expulsion of Huguenots elsewhere later. The decadence of Narbonne as a port is due to natural causes. Formerly surrounded by lagoons affording free communication with the sea, the Languedocian Venice has gradually lost her advantageous position. The transitional stage induced such unhealthy climatic conditions that at one period there seemed a likelihood ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... generally those no longer young, still like very much the fashion of visiting on New-Year's day, and go to see as many people as they can in a brief winter's sunshine. These gentlemen deplore the basket at the door, and the decadence of the old custom in New York. Family friends and old friends, those whom they never see at any other time, are to be seen—or they should be seen, so these ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... Rossi, "like every school of acting that is founded on art, and not on Nature, is falling into decadence. It is ruled by tradition, not by the realities of life and passion. One incident that I beheld at a rehearsal at that theatre in 1855 revealed the usual process by which their great performers study their art. I was then fulfilling an engagement in Paris with Ristori, and, though only twenty-two ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... mind seemed to be running on this subject of all things that morning. He had been reading an article in the Fortnightly on the growing sensationalism, and therefore the general decadence of the English Press a day or two before, and this had got connected up in his thoughts with the amazing happenings of the last twelve hours, and he asked himself what would happen if he were to give the narrative of his experiences in a letter to the Times, supported by the authority ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... intelligent and dangerous man. They suspected him of great personal ambition. It would not have been logical to think that this cold unexpansive man was, in his heart, a patriot who felt Spain's decadence deeply and was seeking the means to ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... Gordon, having counted; and Mr. Curtenty gazed at him in reproach, for that he, a Town Councillor, had thus mathematically demonstrated the commercial decadence of Bursley. ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... suddenness of the catastrophe was essential to the lesson. The same necessity exists no longer, the Chosen People are now beyond the lesson, and nations undergo suffering, and approach dissolution, by laws not unlike those of the decadence of the human frame; the disease makes progress, but the evidence scarcely strikes the eye, and the seat of the distemper is almost beyond human investigation. The jealousy of the European powers, too, protects the Turk. But he must go down—Mahometanism is already decaying. Stamboul, its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... decadence Spain had then fallen is well known to any reader of modern history, and the history of modern Europe contains no more terrible lesson. The Austrian dynasty, insatiable and jealous, had sought to impose at once upon ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... there is rarely to be found in the Church annals an excommunication on the ground of chauvinism or brutal egoism. No one of the world conquerors—neither Napoleon nor Kaiser William—have been excommunicated by the Church. It signifies an extreme decadence of the Church. And this decadence penetrates and dominates our own time. Speaking on the reunion of the Churches the peoples of the East are anxious to know—not whether the Church of the West has preserved the unmixed Christian spirit in its integrity, ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... every one of the Friars of our Lady who had a house in Norwich having been carried off, and the fact that their house was left tenantless, that we know anything of their fate. Wadding, the great annalist of the Franciscans, while deploring the notorious decadence in the morale of the mendicant orders during the fourteenth century—a decadence which he does not attempt to deny—attributes it wholly to the action of the Black Death, and is glad to find in that calamity ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... propounded by him solely in order that he might have the pleasure of solving them himself. Unfortunately very few of them have survived, and when travelling through Spain, collecting material for a proposed work on "The Spanish Onion as a Cause of National Decadence," I only discovered a very few. One of these concerns the three boxes that appear ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... had written: "Cette apologetique sans franchise est l'une des causes de notre decadence religieuse depuis des siecles.... Sommes-nous les predicateurs du mensonge ou les apotres de la verite? Le temps n'est-il pas venu de rejeter avec degout les fraudes, les interpolations, et les mutilations que les menteurs et les faussaires, nos ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... at home here in Memphis," he observed, when the old man had expressed his surprise at the decadence and melancholy change in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... representatives would find Pekin too hot to hold them; arsenals would gradually languish and cease to work; native-owned steamers would leave off plying the waters; and the whole country would eventually fall back into a condition of even more rapid decadence than that in which it was found when England first interfered to prop it up. What is perhaps more melancholy to contemplate, there would be few, if any, of her most ardent patriots but would congratulate themselves on the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... a cosmetic could be made to yield iron by melting it with charcoal he opened a new era in civilization, though doubtless the ocher artists of that day denounced him as a utilitarian and deplored the decadence of the times. ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... moral cohesion between individuals, that the larger the town the feebler the spiritual unity, we are face to face with the heaviest indictment that can be brought against modern industrial progress, and the forces driving an increased proportion of our population into towns are bringing about a decadence of morale which is the necessary counterpart of the deterioration ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... foresees this end approaching strive to hasten its arrival, or should he oppose it? In a decadent society, to come nearer to the problems which concern us in ethics, must a man strive to realize the social will expressed in progressive decadence? Should he hasten the decline ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton |
