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

Among the many reasons assignable for the sad decay of true Christianity, perhaps the neglecting to assemble ourselves together, in religious societies, may not be one of the least.

There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.

Where wealth accumulates, men decay.

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.

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

False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.

Too much freedom can lead to the soul's decay.

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

I always believed 'The Fly' to be a classic opera story. It's a tale of love and death, true love surviving in the face of physical decay and ultimate sacrifice.

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.

There is no such thing as death. In nature nothing dies. From each sad remnant of decay, some forms of life arise so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

Who am I? Not the body, because it is decaying; not the mind, because the brain will decay with the body; not the personality, nor the emotions, for these also will vanish with death.

Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.

Life is one long decay, no? There's a lot of beauty in it. Like the patina in an old city.

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.

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

A Stone of Revenge Never Decays.

"Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

Nobody ever overcomes the phantasms of his childhood. The man is the corrupt dream of the child, and since there is only decay, and no time, what we call days and evenings are the false angels of our existence. There is nothing except sleep and the moon between the boy and the man; dogs dream and bay the moon, who is the mother of the unconscious. Sorrow and pleasure are the stuff of dreams and the energies of myriads of planets. What is the space between the boy and the man? Did the child who is now the man ever live? Did Christ exist and was Brutus at Philippi? The centuries that divide one from Jesus and Brutus contain no time. We still hear the tinkling of the sheep bells at Mamre, and Abraham continues to sleep beneath the terebinths just as Saul sits and broods underneath a tamarisk-but all these are "thoughts of the visions of the night.