Luxury
idea · 6 works · 9 mentions · 16 anchored passages
luxury · elaborate stucco · elegance · luxuriously · prosperity · the pleasures of luxury
in the texts
Letters to Lucilius
Excess and self-indulgence, presented both as the vice corrupting the unreformable friend and as the social root of stylistic decline.
When prosperity has spread luxury far and wide, men first begin to be more careful in the adornment of their persons.
We shall, then, pass our verdict on him when he has made us believe that luxury is now hateful to him;
Luxury has upset his stomach;
An Essay on Crimes and Punishments
Wealth-derived pleasure and consumption, analyzed for its shifting political effects: sometimes favoring despotism, sometimes checking it, depending on population and liberty.
Security and liberty, restrained by the laws, are the basis of happiness, and when attended by these, the pleasures of luxury favour population, without which they become the instrument of tyranny.
The pleasures of luxury are not the principal sources of this happiness;
When the populousness of a country does not increase in proportion to its extent, luxury favours despotism, for where men are most dispersed, there is least industry, the dependence of the poor upon the luxury of the rich is greatest, and the union of the oppressed against the oppressors is least to be feared.
Orations
The vice of excessive comfort and self-indulgence, presented as the primary cause of civic and moral ruin.
For do not think that the rams nor the siege-engines nor the other machines so overturn as luxury, whether one wishes to see a man fallen or a city.
For not even do the gods any longer love the wanton and senseless and licentious and those inclined to insolence and idleness and luxury.
But nonetheless, when luxury and insolence entered into them and they thought they needed nothing of education and temperance, they became by far the most unfortunate of all.
Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated
A vice presented as the modern-day analogue of religious heresy, invoked by advocates of government regulation of property to justify their designs.
Luxury is now made the heresy, by which the new order of apparent zealots, but cool calculators of dollars and cents, advance their designs.
On Anger
A vice of excessive indulgence, cited as a false claimant to greatness of mind alongside anger
Or if anger seems to anyone to produce greatness of mind, let luxury seem so too—it wants to be borne on ivory, to be clothed in purple, to be roofed with gold, to shift lands, to enclose seas, to fling rivers headlong, to hang woods aloft;
De Cultu Feminarum
Excess and self-indulgence in bodily pleasure and display
How nearly these pomps minister to the business of luxury and clash with the disciplines of modesty is easy to discern, in that they prostitute the charm of beauty by the partnership of apparel:
For where there is modesty, there beauty is idle, because properly the use and fruit of beauty is luxury—unless someone supposes another harvest of bodily comeliness.