William Shakespeare
Playwright, Poet
"My way of life Is fall'n into the sear and yellow leaf."
Decay quotes
Decay
228 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Allen Ginsberg
Poet, Activist
"I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision."
Sylvia Plath
Poet, Novelist
"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."
Carl Sagan
Astronomer, Astrophysicist
"The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance."
Cato the Younger
Politician
"Flee sloth; for the indolence of the soul is the decay of the body."
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Decay quotes (page 1 of 12)
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"We begin to die from the moment we are born, for birth is the cause of death. The nature of decay is inherent in youth, the nature of sickness is inherent in health, in the midst of life we are verily in death."
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"I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."
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"If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays."
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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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day."
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"Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away."
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"Any society which does not insist upon respect for all life must necessarily decay."
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"When love begins to sicken and decay it uses an enforced ceremony."
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"Abandon the secret chamber and the spiritual life will decay."
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"We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay."
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"Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things."
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"A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays."
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"There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary."
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"Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old."
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"Contentment is not happiness. Contentment is stagnation and decay, whereas happiness is life and growth."
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"[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not."
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"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
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"All compounded things are subject to decay. Strive with diligence!"
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