Quotes About Decay

What comes from the earth always returns. What flourishes, dies away to bloom again.

Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?

Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.

Let my body be delivered to the earth without attention to the place where it lies; nothing should be associated with my dusty remains. Shame on him who draws any attention to a rotted flesh that is already no longer mine: he is worshipping the worms nibbling it.

Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.

By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days.

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 world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.

It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.

You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.

Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.

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

There's a lot to be done; I just see a total moral decay in our society.

But along the way, that energy becomes increasingly useless. It turns into heat and noise,

signal of particles beyond the Standard Model, helping the Higgs decay into two photons.

We're constantly confronted with the lazy, the apathetic, the immoral, the indifferent, the irresponsible, and the disconnected—the signs of a decaying culture.

Is it like a rust, a rheum about the heart?

We wear our lives Like costumes Use bills and coins like props In an over budget production That we cannot seem to stop So it just goes on like this As if we accept this As if we've all become Buddhas of mass production Our brains rotting Like teeth Under the sweet Unending bliss of false enlightenment.

Many cells inside my ears, in the ossicle, and malleus, cochlea, have died where they lived and worked—I don't know if they're there, still, looking like themselves but dead, or if their corpses wore away, broke down to their elements and were shuffled off by capillaries, I don't know if I peed them out and now they're in an ocean bay or trench, or if I breathed them out, I might breathe one in again.

India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.

Corruption is never compulsory.

A frail gift is beauty, which grows less as time draws on, and is devoured by its own years.

Tempus edax rerum. Time that devours all things.