"Too much of a good thing can be wonderful! "
— Mae West

"I use to be Snow White, but I drifted."
— Mae West

"Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves."
— Dorothy Parker

"The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance."
— Charles Baudelaire

"Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it."
— Gustave Flaubert

"We revel in the laxness of the path we take."
— Charles Baudelaire

"For a decadent like Baudelaire the only possible ends are suicide or the foot of the cross"
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

"The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer"
— Alfred De Musset (Lorenzaccio)

"The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence."
— Remy de Gourmont (The Angels of Perversity)

"The habit is now confirmed in me of spending the greater part of the day in sleep, while by night I wander far and wide through the city under the sedative influence of a tincture which has become necessary to my life"
— Matthew Phipps Shiel (Xelucha and Others)

"Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence."
— J.G. Ballard (The Complete Short Stories)

"Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation."
— Iwan Goll

"You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep"
— Alfred De Musset (Lorenzaccio)

"Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise."
— Remy de Gourmont (The Angels of Perversity)

"There is an energy which springs from sickness and debility: it has a more powerful effect than the real, but, sadly, expires in an even greater infirmity."
— Novalis