Decay Quotes - Page 7

• ...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.

  Alberto Moravia

  Flower, Loss, Dust

  Alberto Moravia (2011). “Boredom”, p.5, New York Review of Books

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Weakness, Kind, Young

  Oscar Wilde (1899). “The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.127

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• When it becomes a part of every man's thinking that a single thought can change the polarity of our entire body toward either life or death - and can likewise change its entire chemistry toward increasing alkalinity or acidity to strengthen it or weaken it - or can change the shape of every corpuscle of matter in the entire body in the direction of either growth or decay - then the medical profession will radically change both its principles and its practices with the ailment of bodies.

  Walter Russell

  Life, Healing, Thinking

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• Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents: how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? But I was doomed to live.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Children, Men, Parent

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2009). “Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus”, p.269, The Floating Press

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

  Yukio Mishima

  World, Kind, Purity

  Yukio Mishima (1958). “Confessions of a Mask”, p.72, New Directions Publishing

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• The problem with living so long is that we get used to it. We watch the mortals age and wither and die around us, watch the world change and decay...but no matter the hardship or the pain or the sorrow we suffer, we choose to continue living. Out of sheer habit, I think.

  Derek Landy

  Pain, Regret, Thinking

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• We (Muslims) have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realise that it was the negligence of the Muslims - and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam - that caused our present decay.

  Muhammad Asad

  Teaching, Past, Islam

  Muhammad Asad (1993). “Islam at the Crossroads”, p.59, The Other Press

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• I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.

  David Lynch

  Pain, Flower, Creativity

  "Fifty Contemporary Film Directors". Book edited by Yvonne Tasker, p. 259, 2010.

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• 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.

  William S. Burroughs

  Dark, Body, Steam

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• In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

  China Mieville

  Crush, Fall, Dark

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• Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Woe, Ruins

  'Richard II' (1595) act 3, sc. 2, l. 103

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• I do not think I exaggerate when I say that some of us put our offering in the plate with a kind of triumphant bounce as much as to say: "There - now God will feel better!" I am obliged to tell you that God does not need anything you have. He does not need a dime of your money. It is your own spiritual welfare at stake in such matters as these. You have the right to keep what you have all to yourself - but it will rust and decay, and ultimately ruin you.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Spiritual, Feel Better, Thinking

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• Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can’t see them. Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself — soul-less and evil. You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.

  J. K. Rowling

  Memories, Air, Long

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• One trait in the philosopher's character we can assume is his love of the knowledge that reveals eternal reality, the realm unaffected by change and decay.

  Plato

  Character, Reality, Words Of Wisdom

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• When the mind's eye rests on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence.

  Plato

  Confused, Twilight, Eye

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• For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Law, Soul, Church

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

  Umberto Eco

  Sweet, Book, World

  Umberto Eco (2014). “The Name of the Rose”, p.120, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• With each shimmy, the bugle beads on their scandalously revealing costumes swung and shook. It was the sort of display Evie knew her mother would have found appalling—an example of the moral decay of the young generation. It was sexual and dangerous and thrilling, and Evie wanted more of it.

  Libba Bray

  Mother, Young Generation, Example

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• Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Fall, Eye

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.155, Anchor

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• All disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed.

  Florence Nightingale

  Taken, Nursing, Years

  Florence Nightingale (1860). “Notes on Nursing: What it Is, and what it is Not”, p.1

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• 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.

  George Eliot

  Thinking, Nails, Each Day

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• It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.

  Yasmina Khadra

  Men, Land, World

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• One trait in the philosopher's character we can assume is his love of the knowledge that reveals eternal reality, the realm unaffected by change and decay. He is in love with the whole of that reality, and will not willingly be deprived even of the most insignificant fragment of it - just like the lovers and men of ambition we described earlier on.

  Plato

  Ambition, Character, Reality

  Plato, Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee (1987). “The Republic”

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• All Kings, and all their favorites, All glory of honors, beauties, wits, The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass, Is elder by a year, now, than it was When thou and I first one another saw: All other things, to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This, no tomorrow hash, nor yesterday, Running, it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

  John Donne

  Running, Kings, Elderly

  John Donne (2012). “Selected Poems”, p.25, Courier Corporation

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• There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.

  Hector Hugh Munro

  Hatred, Humanity, Lasts

  Saki, Hector Hugh Munro (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Saki (Illustrated)”, p.474, Delphi Classics

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