Decay Quotes - Page 24

• Beware of suretyship for thy best friend; he that payeth another man's debt seeketh his own decay.

  Joseph Jekyll

  Best Friend, Men, Debt

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• A message came from my youth of vanished days, saying, 'I wait for you among the quivering of unborn May, where smiles ripen for tears and hours ache with songs unsung.' It says, 'Come to me across the worn-out track of age, through the gates of death. For dreams fade, hopes fail, the fathered fruits of the year decay, but I am the eternal truth, and you shall meet me again and again in your voyage of life from shore to shore.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Dream, Song, Years

  Rabindranath Tagore, “Lover's Gifts XL: A Message Came”

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• What more could you want? How about dominion over this 'beautiful place'? Beauty doesn't last. Friends and family decay. Power is the only thing that goes on forever." Jack answered with his gut. "No, love goes on forever.

  P. C. Cast

  Beautiful, Forever, Family And Friends

  P. C. Cast, Kristin Cast (2011). “Awakened: A House of Night Novel”, p.60, Macmillan

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• 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

  Octavio Paz

  Criticism, Firsts, Language

  Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.263, Grove Press

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• Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last.

  Isaac Rosenberg

  Time, Growth, Earth

  Isaac Rosenberg (2015). “Delphi Complete Poetry, Plays, Letters and Prose of Isaac Rosenberg (Illustrated)”, p.203, Delphi Classics

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• The flash would prove that proton decay really happens. The flash would mean that the matter of the proton - the solid stuff - had turned into the energy of the flash (E-mc2). Totally. Nothing left behind. No ash. No smoke. No smell. Nada. One moment it's there, the next moment - pffft - gone. What would it mean? Only this: Nothing lasts. Nothing. Because everything that exists is made of protons.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Mean, Smell, Energy

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• In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Punishment, Criminals, Crime

  Jean Jacques Rousseau (2015). “The Social Contract”, p.145, Jean Jacques Rousseau

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• Do you realize that there is nothing in our genes that tells us when to die? There are genetic codes that tell us how to grow, how to breathe, and how to sleep, but NOTHING that tells us to die. So why do we? Because we literally rust and decay our bodies from the inside out with poor food and lifestyle choices.

  Jillian Michaels

  Motivational, Sleep, Lifestyle Choices

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• All things that have form eventually decay." -Orochimaru

  Masashi Kishimoto

  Form, All Things

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• The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
  Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made.

  Edmund Waller

  Time, Dark, Light

  Edmund Waller, Sir John Denham (1857). “The poetical works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham”, p.200

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• Dropt tears have hastened your decay, And brought you one step nigher death; And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved, The music of Love's golden breath, And seen the light in eyes that loved. You think you hold the core and kernel, Of all the world beneath your crust, Old dial? But when you lie in dust, This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved. Love is eternal.

  Eleanor Farjeon

  Life, Strong, Lying

  "Pan-Worship: And Other Poems (Time And Love)". Book by Eleanor Farjeon, 1908.

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• Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over; One thing unshaken stays: Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover; Whereby decays, Each thing save one thing: mid this strife diurnal, Of hourly change begot, Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal, And changes not; Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers, Find altered by-and-bye, When, with possession, time anon discovers, Trapped dreams must die, - For he that visions God, of mankind gathers, One manlike trait alone, And reverently imputes to Him a father's love for his son.

  James Branch Cabell

  Life, Dream, Father

  "The Certain Hour (To Robert Gamble Cabell II: In Dedication of The Certain Hour)". Book by James Branch Cabell, 1916.

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• How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?

  Joseph Heller

  Running, Evil, People

  Catch-22 ch. 18 (1961)

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• Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense. A composition for cheapness and not excellence of workmanship is the most frequent and certain cause of the rapid decay and entire destruction of arts and manufacturers.

  Josiah Wedgwood

  Beautiful, Wisdom, Art

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• Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.

  Gregory Maguire

  Brightness, Wells, Knows

  Gregory Maguire (2013). “The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz”, p.122, Harper Collins

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• Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. 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 to us than any other.

  Sigmund Freud

  Pain, Men, Anxiety

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed, And feeds the green earth with its swift decay, Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.

  James Russell Lowell

  Spring, Flower, Evil

  James Russell Lowell (1873). “The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell”, p.34

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• What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Stars, Light, Long

  Jeanette Winterson (2010). “Weight”, p.3, Canongate Books

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• Wimsey stooped for an empty sardine-tin which lay, horribly battered, at his feet, and slung it idly into the quag. It struck the surface with a noice like a wet kiss, and vanished instantly. With that instinct which prompts one, when depressed, to wallow in every circumstance of gloom, Peter leaned sadly against the hurdles and abandoned himself to a variety of shallow considerations upon (1) The vanity of human wishes; (2) Mutability; (3) First love; (4) The decay of idealism; (5) The aftermath of the Great war; (6) Birth-control; and (7) The fallacy of free-will.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  War, Kissing, First Love

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• Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Fall, Air, Hands

  Jorge Luis Borges, Donald A. Yates, James East Irby (1964). “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings”, p.52, New Directions Publishing

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• And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you’re a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.

  Eldridge Cleaver

  Love, Kindness, Greatness

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• Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Memories, Adventure, Unique

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• Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man ... cannot be exempt from the common destiny.

  Chief Seattle

  Regret, Destiny, Men

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• But what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?" "Indifference." Jerusha surprised herself with the answer. "Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.

  Joan D. Vinge

  Hate, Giving, Stronger

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• It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

  Robert Silverberg

  Color, Years, Vision

  Robert Silverberg (2009). “Dying Inside”, p.116, Macmillan

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