Quotes Tagged "decay"

Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.

Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.

Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.

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.

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.

We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minuets we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom.

It is the smell of a million mould-blossomed pages, of a thousand decaying bindings, of a universe of dead words.

Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

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

Life - a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.