Decay Quotes

Throughout the whole vegetable, sensible, and rational world, whatever makes progress towards maturity, as soon as it has passed that point, begins to verge towards decay.

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

We've come a long way in our thinking, but also in our moral decay. I can't imagine Dr. King watching the 'Real Housewives' or 'Jersey Shore.'

Our works decay and disappear but God gentlest works stay looking down on the ruins we toil to rear.

Where wealth accumulates, men decay.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

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

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

If movies are causing moral decay, then crime ought to be going up, but crime is going down.

We must act swiftly in order to halt the rate of decay our planet faces.

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

Too much freedom can lead to the soul's decay.

The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles.

We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.