Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten when their…

Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and…

— Marcus Aurelius

Our works decay and disappear but God gentlest works stay looking down on the ruins we toil to rear.

— Walter Smith

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors…

— Gao Xingjian

Youth should be radical. Youth should demand change in the world. Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move…

— William Allen White

“They went through the last of the cars and then walked up the track to the locomotive and climbed up to the catwalk. Rust…

— Cormac McCarthy

Cocaine decisions that you make today, will mean nothing later on when you get nose decay.

— Frank Zappa

But the grind has begun. The windows don’t open, and even the availability of near-constant jokes about Jews and Mormons fails to stem the…

— Dave Eggers

No government can be strong and flourishing while the national character is weak and degraded. A government must flourish and decay with its subjects;…

— Benjamin Robbins Curtis

It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land…

— Yasmina Khadra

The ensouled is distinguished from the unsouled by its being alive. Now since being alive is spoken of in many ways, even if only…

— Aristotle

Wise people are able to give themselves gracefully to seemingly contradictory experiences, because they know that they belong to different seasons of life, all…

— Sam Keen

We think literature is immortal, but even that decays and ultimately turns to dust.

— Mick Farren

I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit…

— Clive Barker

One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat's-cradle with every train…

— Sylvia Townsend Warner

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or…

— Susan Sontag