Decadence Quote by Terence McKenna

“What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.”

Terence McKenna

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Decadence Freedom

More by Terence McKenna

History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.

Terence McKenna

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We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as…

Terence McKenna

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you…

Terence McKenna

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We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.

Terence McKenna

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What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense…

Terence McKenna

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What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

Terence McKenna

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And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.

Terence McKenna

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Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types…

Terence McKenna

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Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.

Terence McKenna

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This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze…

Terence McKenna

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of…

Terence McKenna

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

Terence McKenna

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More Decadence quotes

One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.

Robert Silverberg

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“Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as…

Asti Hustvedt

I think Illium can take care of himself.” “Not if he keeps flirting with you.” A fine, almost elegant tendril of heat, champagne and…

Nalini Singh

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“(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language... forcing itself to express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours; listening that it may translate them to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved…

Theophile Gautier

“After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes, our impoverished lovemaking. Her soul had remained over there, among the gigantic, poisonous flowers. She missed the mystery of old temples and the ardor of a sky blazing with fever, sensuality and death. The better to…

Octave Mirbeau

I definitely consider 'Poses' - the whole album in fact - to be kind of a miracle. Like the last breath of that moment…

Rufus Wainwright

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Content without style is propaganda or adolescence. Style without content is decadence.

Rita Mae Brown

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Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's…

Barbara Tuchman

Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are…

Salman Rushdie

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The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring…

Ellen Glasgow

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“He saw a chamber, broad and low, designed, in its every rich stain of picture and slumberous hanging, to appeal to the sensuous. And here the scent was thick and motionless. Costly marqueterie; Palissy candlesticks reflected in half-concealed mirrors framed in embossed silver; antique Nankin vases brimming with pot-pourri; in one comer a suit of Milanese armour, fluted, damasquinee, by…

Bernard Capes