Giambattista Vico Quotes

I succumbed to hedonism.

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Luxury and Ostentation usually make me feel antsy, like I'm going to get a case of gout.

He who takes his fill of every pleasure ... becomes depraved; while he who avoids all pleasures alike ... becomes insensible.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it's what he descends to that shames the human race.

Ingrateful man with liquorish draughts, and morsels unctuous, greases his pure mind that from it all consideration slips.

The passion of acquiring riches in order to support a vain expense corrupts the purest souls.

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

It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.

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.

Let us consider what we call vicious luxury. No gratification, however sensual, can of itself be esteemed vicious. A gratification is only vicious when it engrosses all a man's expense, and leaves no ability for such acts of duty and generosity as are required by his situation and fortune. The same care and toil that raise a dish of peas at Christmas would give bread to a whole family during six months.

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.

As an artist I am attracted by decadence, by those who exhaust their lives in the shallow pursuits of pleasure. Occasionally, I feel that spiritually I participate in all these kinds of lives.

In order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things that he considers necessary to his existence.

...existence has become an unreasoning, wild dance around the golden calf, a mad worship of God Mammon. In that dance and in that worship man has sacrificed all his finer qualities of the heart and soul — kindness and justice, honor and manhood, compassion and sympathy with his fellowman.

Most human behavior is nothing other than the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure.

Space tourism is God's way of telling you you aren't spending enough on lap dances, baccarat and cocaine.

The only decent people I ever saw at the racecourse were horses.

The world is grown so bad, That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.

Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it.

What's wrong with people?" she says, almost too quiet for me to hear. "Were they born with parts missing or did it fall out somewhere along the way?

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.

The goof man, in dealing with his people, taxes them with luxury.

Man is not born wicked; he becomes so, as he becomes sick.