Decay Quotations | Page 2

The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.

Pessimism negates the existing world. Yet its negating is ambiguous. It can simply will decay and nothingness, but it can also renounce what exists and thus open a path for a new formation of the world.

For the first time in my life, I felt that a wave, a justice was sweeping away a deep-seated decay without any indulgence. I dearly wished that it would keep going without hesitation or deviation, in a spirit of purity forever.

What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism -- can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

The familiarities of the gaming-table contribute very much to the decay of politeness ... The pouts and quarrels that naturally arise from disputes must put an end to all complaisance, or even good will towards one another.

Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.

We notice that the mind grows with the body, and with it decays.

We plainly perceive that the mind strengthens and decays with the body.

Knowledge is an excellent drug; but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.

All things that have form eventually decay." -Orochimaru

As a youth, I sought out decadence; as an elder, I try to avoid decay.

Growth provides novel experiences for youth; decay the same, alas, for age.

The word "salvation" denotes rescue. Rescue? What from? Well, of course, ultimately death. And since it is sin that colludes with the forces of evil and decay, sin leads to death. So we are rescued from sin and death.

Aging is not just decay, you know, its growth.

For ivy climbs the crumbling hall To decorate decay.

We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.

Things begin, things decay, and you've got to find a way to be okay.

The maggots told you something, but the decay of the bodies told you something else,

People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.

The soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God's organic will, which rules and moulds this universe.

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

It is a universal principle that whenever one refuses to use his God-given powers, these powers decay and perish.

Where there is no strife there is decay: 'The mixture which is not shaken decomposes.'

The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

All fresh meat is eaten in a state of decay. The process may not have proceeded so far that the dull human nose can discover it, but a carrion bird or a carrion fly can smell it from afar.

Life passes, riches fly away, popularity is fickle, the senses decay, the world changes. One alone is true to us; One alone can be all things to us; One alone can supply our need.

All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay...

Royalty is the gold filling in a mouthful of decay

Thy decay's still impregnate with divinity.

Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay?

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

Pity only on fresh objects stays, but with the tedious sight of woes decays.

It is Enterprise which build and improves the world's possessions...If Enterprise is afoot, Wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift; and if Enterprise is asleep, Wealth decays, whatever Thrift may be doing.

Nearly all our ills are the result of neglect in some way or other. And this truth may be said to apply to the ills of nations as well. Negligence is at the bottom of all decay. And decay always starts by showing little signs-or warnings. Then is the time to show interest and to be alert. There is nothing quite so easy as to neglect, and nothing quite so difficult as to repair that negligence. Negligence always carries a high price. It costs nothing to avoid it!

And so all growth that is not towards God Is growing towards decay.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?

But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay, I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

We might make a public moan in the newspapers about the decay of conscience, but in private conversation, no matter what crimes a man may have committed or how cynically he may have debased his talent or his friends, variations on the answer Yes, but I did it for the money, satisfy all but the most tiresome objections.

You guard against decay, in general, and stagnation, by moving, by continuing to move.

All things are subject to decay and change...

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

Let the entire system of government be strengthened, and let the balance of power be drawn up in such a manner that it will be permanent and incapable of decay because of its own tenuity.

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

All bodies are slow in growth but rapid in decay.

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

A wit should no more be sincere, than a woman constant; one argues a decay of parts, as to other of beauty.

Youth should be radical. Youth should demand change in the world. Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on. But the old orders should not be moved easily - certainly not at the mere whim or behest of youth. There must be clash and if youth hasn't enough force or fervor to produce the clash the world grows stale and stagnant and sour in decay.

States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, their decay.

Death was in every sell of his body. He gave off a faint, greenish steam of decay. Lee imagined he would glow in the dark.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.

...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust

Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud The eating canter dwells, so eating love Inhabits in the finest wits of all.

My way of life Is fall'n into the sear and yellow leaf.

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.

By 'life,' we mean a thing that can nourish itself and grow and decay.

Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.

When love begins to sicken and decay it uses an enforced ceremony.

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

Any society which does not insist upon respect for all life must necessarily decay.

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

But see, Orion sheds unwholesome dews; Arise, the pines a noxious shade diffuse; Sharp Boreas blows, and nature feels decay, Time conquers all, and we must time obey.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.

The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth.

Probably the worst thing that has happened in America in my time is the decay of confidence in the courts. No one can be sure any more that in a given case they will uphold the plainest mandate of the Constitution. On the contrary, everyone begins to be more or less convinced in advance that they won't. Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it, but precisely because they appear to be against it.

Alas! the joys that fortune brings Are trifling, and decay, And those who prize the trifling things, More trifling still than they.

Trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay.

Where wealth accumulates, men decay.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

Wealth accumulates, and men decay.

Nations and empires flourish and decay, By turns command, and in their turns obey.

Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.

There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country.

When learning stops, decay sets in.

Gorgeous flowerets in the sunlight shining, Blossoms flaunting in the eye of day, Tremulous leaves, with soft and silver lining, Buds that open only to decay.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away.