Quotes about Decay

No matter how advanced its progress, any generation that neglects its spiritual and moral life is going to disintegrate.

Man is not growing better! Man is not climbing upward. Instead of progress in man himself there is degeneracy—degeneracy of body, mind, and spirit. Man is going downhill.

But when the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city

Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them.

All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay.

In glades they meet skull after skull/Where pine-cones lay--the rusted gun,/Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat/And cuddled-up skeleton;/And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,/And comrades lost bemoan:/By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged--/But the Year and the Man were gone. (The Armies of the Wilderness)

When private virtue is hazarded on the perilous cast of expediency, the pillars of the republic, however apparent their stability, are infected with decay at the very centre.

The priest must not postpone this union with the Holy Spirit to a more convenient season (Acts 24:25). If he neglects growth, decay sets in. There comes a time when it is too late to repent, even to ask for a drop of water to 'cool my tongue' (Lk 16:24).

Change is the universal experience. Thou art thyself undergoing a perpetual transformation and, in some sort, decay: aye and the whole Universe as well.

Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble.

But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators

Because one stage of depravity is lower than another, this does not warrant the denial that the first stage is degraded. The development of wickedness is one thing; the presence of any measure of holiness or virtue is another. The absence of certain forms of sins does not imply any innate purity. It might as well be affirmed that a recent corpse, which is less loathsome, is therefore less dead than one which is far gone in decay and putrefaction.