Claudian Quotes

Decadence is wonderful.

On the soft bed of luxury many kingdoms have expired.

All luxury corrupts either the morals or the taste.

Fashion was the only law, pleasure the only pursuit, and the splendour of dress and furniture was the only distinction of the citizens of Antioch. The arts of luxury were honoured; the serious and manly virtues were the subject of ridicule; and the contempt for female modesty and reverent age announced the universal corruption of the capital of the East.

Pleasures bring effeminacy, and effeminacy foreruns ruin; such conquests, without blood or sweat, sufficiently do revenge themselves upon their intemperate conquerors.

I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.

I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.

Fame introduced me to a world of instant gratification and decadence I hadn't seen before.

I want to drink champagne from ladies' shoes.

I guess I've always lived the glamorous life of a star. It 's nothing new - I used to spend down to the last dime.

Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains.

…luxury is the result of wealth, or it makes wealth necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the one by possessing, the other by coveting. It sells out the fatherland to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by enslaving some of them to others and all of them to opinion.

Sedition is bred in the lap of luxury and its chosen emissaries are the beggared spendthrift and the impoverished libertine.

Pompeii was an incredibly corrupt city. Pompeii was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire.

The habitual living in prosperity is most injurious.

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance.

Luxury is a word of uncertain signification, and may be taken in a good as in a bad sense

I like this word decadent; all shimmering and purple and gold.

An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age.

Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities.

The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.

Excess is not really something I consider a bad thing; especially when you are talking about living.

Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satyrists, and severe moralists.

Luxury destroys more efficiently than war.