40 Quotes About Decay

When you can’t seem to overcome something that seems like it should be easy, it’s always best to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong. For some of us, it may come down to our attitude or perspective, but there are some things that are inevitable in life. Even though we can’t always control what happens, there are ways to make the most of situations and find the lessons in them. Here are a few words to live by when you can’t seem to get past an obstacle that stands in your way.

Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and...
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Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day. William Shakespeare
Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth....
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Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation. Iwan Goll
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You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay. Murasaki Shikibu
Routine ruins the life, variety vitalise the life.
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Routine ruins the life, variety vitalise the life. Amit Kalantri
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A lot of things in the house were broken or forgotten: the kitchen clock stopped, a closet doorknob coming off in my hand. The sparkly mess of flies I'd swept from the corners. It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay. Emma Cline
â€â€¹More than GM Foods I am afraid of GMM People....
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â€â€¹More than GM Foods I am afraid of GMM People. Genetically and Mentally Mutated People. The Entire Ecosystem Mutates. Vineet Raj Kapoor
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must...
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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. Ernst Fischer
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My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God’s love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me. Craig D. Lounsbrough
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The world has enough deceit, decay, and despair; be different. Lindsey Rietzsch
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What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion --- . Thomas Mann
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I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe! The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Nature–calm, passive, silent, unfathomable, –and our own everyday worries–paltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river. Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten! . Rabindranath Tagore
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By assembling in our mind all the consequential facts we have lived through and by reviewing, appraising or sometimes idealizing the numerous key points of the past, authenticity may gradually mutate and actuality decay at last. At that point in time we are to experience a maimed factuality. ("Labyrinth of the mind") Erik Pevernagie
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Desires may dry off, bodies may decay, friendship may vanish and positions may be dissolved. One thing will remain; the word of God! In the word is life! Israelmore Ayivor
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Material wealth do not last forever, but that which probably lasts forever is the wealth of intelligence and creativity. Michael Bassey Johnson
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As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt. What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet." Ah, humanity.." But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself. Nathanael West
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Nothing stays forever, nobody does rather. All the things, people will leave you one fine day and you’ll be a wanderer in solitude again. You’ll moan again silently through the process of decaying. All your richness or poornesswas never really of worth. When you were born, you were dead, respiring to cease. You’re a trader, exchanging everything! Nupur Walia
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We are born into a realm of constant change. Everything is decaying. We are continually losing all that we come in contact with. Our tendency to get attached to impermanent experiences causes sorrow, lamentation and grief, because eventually we are separated from everything and everyone we love. Our lack of acceptance and understanding of this fact makes life unsatisfactory. Noah Levine
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Life is Not a perpetual climb towards Greatness.For our family, ourselves, and friends, It is but sad Decay, so, Let every girl die after her Hebé (Ἥβη).And every man after his Aristeia(ἀριστεία). Roman Payne
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Change your environment and if the need be, change your company because it goes a long way to create another version for you which can easily ripe for decay! Israelmore Ayivor
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As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything - pleasure, gaud display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Ragpicking was a profession. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery. E.L. Doctrow
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When what one does, reps, or 'spits', repetitively, is foul or beastly - one summons spiritual undertakers to dine on fleshly parasites. In various forms, nature's law purges all that becomes wasteful. Change your game, or the game will change you. T.F. Hodge
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Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them. Alasdair Gray
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For meobedience to another is the decayof self Charles Bukowski
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She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes. Emmanuelle De Maupassant
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They ate my humanity but no humanity in beginning humans Earth dust atoms Clever microorganisms defy gods But defy nothing Phantom of truth Beneath reality's facade A.R. LaBaere
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The overall result was drift punctuated by protest. Charles Emmerson
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Don't be carried away by beauty, for the faeces also stays in the rectum of ravishing faces, and their private life is not beautiful as their public life...fear beauty! Michael Bassey Johnson
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Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I ‘see’ is but a single thread and solitary shard of what ‘is’, for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance. Craig D. Lounsbrough
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And now that this body is gone and has been returned to the Earth, I assure everyone that psychic energy doesn’t die, it is recycled throughout the universe and will out live anything that we do as living beings. Flesh will decay, ideas won’t as long as you believe in them and someone believes in you. A.P. Sweet
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Trying to keep up appearances is a signal of decay on the inside. Beware shallow living–in yourself and in others. It is only in the depths that life can thrive. Vironika Tugaleva
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The air around you is filled with floating atoms, sliding down the Earth's spacetime curve. Atoms first assembled in the cores of long-dead stars. Atoms within you, everywhere, disintegrating in radioactive decays. Beneath your feet, the floor - whose electrons refuse to let yours pass, thus making you able to stand and walk and run. Earth, your planet, a lump of matter made out of the three quantum fields known to mankind, held together by gravity, the so-called fourth force (even though it isn't a force), floating within and through spacetime. Christophe Galfard
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Then Chameroy spoke. 'You always put the blame on opium, but as I see it the case of Freneuse is much more complicated. Him, an invalid? No - a character from the tales of Hoffmann! Have you never taken the trouble to look at him carefully? That pallor of decay; the twitching of his bony hands, more Japanese than chrysanthemums; the arabesque profile; that vampiric emaciation - has all of that never given you cause to reflect? In spite of his supple body and his callow face Freneuse is a hundred thousand years old. That man has lived before, in ancient times under the reigns of Heliogabalus, Alexander IV and the last of the Valois. What am I saying? That man is Henri III himself. I have in my library an edition of Ronsard - a rare edition, bound in pigskin with metal trimmings - which contains a portrait of Henri engraved on vellum. One of these nights I will bring the volume here to show you, and you may judge for yourselves. Apart from the ruff, the doublet and the earrings, you would believe that you were looking at the Due de Freneuse. As far as I'm concerned, his presence here inevitably makes me ill - and so long as he is present, there is such an oppression, such a heaviness.. Jean Lorrain
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What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1, 000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now. When people die they are sometimes put into coffins which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots. But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burnt and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antartic, or coming down as rain in rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere. Mark Haddon
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[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews? . Iain Pears
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As I walked over the loose fragments of stone, which lay scattered and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural association of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendor, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, and when they resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since swept from earth. "Thus, " said I, "shall the present generation - he who now sink in misery - and he who now swim in pleasure, alike pass away and be forgotten. Ann Radcliffe
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Even gods decay. Like, in 1890 somebody sold off thousands of mummified Ancient Egyptian sacred cats - _for fertilizer_. Get the point? Constancy isn't. Jonathan Gash
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It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing. . Richard Matheson
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If my belief in the God-force-principle-thing had faltered from time to time, it was completely reaffirmed that morning when I considered how completely brilliant a creation was fermentation. From decay came a pleasure sublime enough to keep decay at bay. Only for a few minutes, perhaps, but some minutes are like no others. Tony Hendra
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I love autumn", Emily said to me. "It wins you over with its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay. Nicholas Sparks