#decay

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.' ↗

— Samuel L. Jackson

#come #decay #dr #housewives #i

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

— Thomas Jefferson

#bodily #body #decay #gloomy #human

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

— Henry W. Kendall

#decay #faces #halt #must #order

Harmony makes small things grow, lack of it makes great things decay. ↗

— Sallust

#all things #decay #great things #grow #harmony

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. ↗

— Sallust

#also #beginning #blessings #decay #end

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

— Charles de Secondat

#always #begins #decay #deterioration #government

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. ↗

— Hu Shih

#basis #better #biological #death #decay

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. ↗

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

#decay #english-literature #king #poetry #power

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

#birth #creation #death #decay #growth

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

#decay #deceit #fiction #form #writers