Decays Quotes & Sayings

Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time. Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations. In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average. Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles. An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for spacetime is no great leap of the imagination. — Taner Edis

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. — Richard Burton

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations. — William Blake

Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone ... The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying. — Russell Jacoby

The excrement bubbles, the century slime decays, and the brainwashing government lackeys would have us say it's under control. — Jethro Tull

What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay. — Erich Fromm

Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up ... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won't drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that's fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed. — Edward St. Aubyn

But we must be completely clear ... if nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out
that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed? Why, if this is a high watermark of our national life, has our speech been vulgarized in this unprecedented way? — Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object. — Joseph Addison

A man lives his life only when he is marching, i thought, when he keeps marching onwards at any price. When he stops marching onwards, he decays. The joy of life is the joy of the experience that comes from feeling one's own strength. — Jan Valtin

But nothing else escapes all-ruinous time.
Earth's might decays, the might of men decays,
Honor grows cold, dishonor flourishes,
There is no constancy 'twixt friend and friend,
Or city and city; be it soon or late,
Sweet turns to bitter, hate once more to love. — Sophocles

Our life is like th' unstable wave, Our bloom of youth decays. Our joys are brief as lightning flash In summer's cloudy days, Our riches fleet as swift as thought; Faith in the One Supreme Alone will bear us o'er the gulfs Of Being's stormy stream. — Bhartrhari

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto. — Ivan Illich

You are one of the unfortunate ones whose body decays rapidly in the face of radiation poisoning. You hang your head over the toilet to vomit again and again, and die praying to the porcelain gods. — A.J. Lauer

My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays-integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit. — Andy Goldsworthy

Time is the speed at which the past decays. — David Mitchell

This mortal life decays apace How soon the bubble's broke Adam and all his numerous race Are Vanity and Smoke. — Nathaniel Philbrick

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? — William Shakespeare

Many ask me whether pranayama ... postpones old age. Why worry about it? Death is certain. Let it come when it comes. Just keep working. The soul has no age. It doesn't die. Only the body decays. And yet, we must never forget the body, since it is the garden we must cherish and cultivate. — B.K.S. Iyengar

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

half of its carbon 14 content decays into nitrogen 14 every 5,700 years, until — Jared Diamond

Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes. — Julian Barnes

Knowledge that is not being used for winning of further knowledge does not even remain- it decays and disappears. — J. D. Bernal

When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before. — Adam Smith

All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poets' forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone,
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth's sad ashes pain and falsehood grow. — Herman Melville

Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The fact that the outer man decays from day to day does not hurt the believers' true Life. It even helps its growth, because the inner — John Calvin

I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays ... — Carmen Laforet

But is it really you
behind the pretenses
beyond dust and distances
beneath the salt and the siren
announcements and ancient
impurities and decays
that claim to be you — W.S. Merwin

We plainly perceive that the mind strengthens and decays with the body. — Lucretius

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it. — James Norman Hall

Kids are excellent judges of character. Instincts are sharp before the cynicism of time decays them to the point they're null and void, useless to most adults. Or maybe we're just good at ignoring them the older we get. When — Kim Holden

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

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably. — Pauline Kael

Because of laziness the building decays, And through idleness of hands the house leaks. — Anonymous

Death and change are busy ever, Man decays, and ages move; But His mercy waneth never; God is wisdom, God is love. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It is Enterprise which build and improves the world's possessions ... If Enterprise is afoot, Wealth accumulates whatever may be happening to Thrift; and if Enterprise is asleep, Wealth decays, whatever Thrift may be doing. — John Maynard Keynes

So peaceful shalt thou end thy blissful days, And steal thyself from life by slow decays. — Homer

Some months ago we discovered that certain light elements emit positrons under the action of alpha particles. Our latest experiments have shown a very striking fact: when an aluminium foil is irradiated on a polonium preparation [alpha ray emitter], the emission of positrons does not cease immediately when the active preparation is removed: the foil remains radioactive and the emission of radiation decays exponentially as for an ordinary radio-element. We observed the same phenomenon with boron and magnesium. — Frederic Joliot-Curie

People always say be true to yourself. But that's misleading, because there are two selves. There's your short term self, and there's your long term self. And if you're only true to your short term self, your long term self slowly decays. — Brandon Stanton

Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

I came to graduate school at Harvard University in 1954. My thesis supervisor, Julian Schwinger, had about a dozen doctoral students at a time. Getting his ear was as difficult as it was rewarding. I called my thesis 'The Vector Meson in Elementary Particle Decays', and it showed an early commitment to an electroweak synthesis. — Sheldon Lee Glashow

Yes, and shall do till the pangs of death shake him. Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool. — William Shakespeare

The soul of an individual; your soul and my soul, is that part of us that is immortal. Your personality is that part of you that was born into time, that matures in time, or at least grows older in time and then decays and passes away. — Gary Zukav

The race of men is like the race of leaves. As one generation flourishes, another decays. — Homer

Time pressure is another driver of effort. As you carried out the Add-3 exercise, the rush was imposed in part by the metronome and in part by the load on memory. Like a juggler with several balls in the air, you cannot afford to slow down; the rate at which material decays in memory forces the pace, driving you to refresh and rehearse information before it is lost. Any task that requires you to keep several ideas in mind at the same time has the same hurried character. — Daniel Kahneman

The discovery of the neutron was a crucial step in understanding nuclei, including radioactive ones. For example, beta decays are the transformation within a nucleus of a nucleon of one type, either a proton or a neutron, to the other. You may wonder how a proton can decay to a neutron if the neutron is heavier than the proton; conservation of energy would seem to make this impossible. However, while a proton not bound in a nucleus cannot transform to a neutron, it is possible in some circumstances for a proton within a nucleus to do so. This is because the proton can use the additional energy from the force that binds nucleons in the nucleus. Beta decay occurs if it results in the total energy of the final atom, taking into account the energy due to binding, being lower that that of the initial atom. The same applies to a neutron bound in a nucleus, whereas a free neutron can always decay to a proton. — Brian R. Martin

All perishes, all decays, all is born again. — Leonid Andreyev

When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when its gone, its like it was never there at all. — Nicola Yoon

Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature. — Andy Goldsworthy

A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don't visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, "This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic." You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt. — Friedensreich Hundertwasser

all photographs are about death, really, and time: about preserving a moment in silver and chemicals, when life itself is never preserved, when every cell of everything is already decaying, and being replaced, and decaying again. The subject and the image coexist for the moment that the shutter opens and closes. And then the subject decays but the image lives on unchanged. — Emma Darwin

The universal nature has no external space; but the wondrous part of her art is that though she has circumscribed herself, everything which is within her which appears to decay and to grow old and to be useless she changes into herself, and again makes other new things from these very same, so that she requires neither substance from without nor wants a place into which she may cast that which decays. She is content then with her own space, and her own matter, and her own art. — Marcus Aurelius

We notice that the mind grows with the body, and with it decays. — Lucretius

It's ironic to think that behaviors we consider neurotic are actually holding the word in place - but sooner or later whatever protection they offer decays.And it's so much work.So damn much work. — Stephen King

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth. — Ernest Becker

What fades, vanishes, decays, dies-that's what one must love. — Marty Rubin

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented. — Mark Twain

When the violation of parity was discovered I began a series of electronic experiments to investigate parity violation in hyperon decays. — James Cronin

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

Faith will falter if the authority of holy scripture is shaken; and if faith falters, love itself decays. For if someone lapses in his faith, he inevitably lapses in his love as well, since he cannot love what he does not believe to be true. — Augustine Of Hippo

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful. — Henry David Thoreau

Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things. — Robert D. Richardson

Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over;
One thing unshaken stays:
Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover;
Whereby decays
Each thing save one thing: - mid this strife diurnal
Of hourly change begot,
Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal,
And changes not; -
Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers
Find altered by-and-bye,
When, with possession, time anon discovers
Trapped dreams must die, -
For he that visions God, of mankind gathers
One manlike trait alone,
And reverently imputes to Him a father's
Love for his son. — James Branch Cabell

The truth is in our bones, for flesh decays and bone endures. — George R R Martin

A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays. — Chinua Achebe

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings — Octavio Paz

What money creates, money preserves: if thy wealth decays, thy honor dies; it is but a slippery happiness which fortunes can give, and frowns can take; and not worth the owning which a night's fire can melt, or a rough sea can drown. — Francis Quarles

Fall is not the end of the gardening year; it is the start of next year's growing season. The mulch you lay down will protect your perennial plants during the winter and feed the soil as it decays, while the cleaned up flower bed will give you a huge head start on either planting seeds or setting out small plants. — Thalassa Cruso

A republic is not an easy form of government to live under, and when the responsibility of citizenship is evaded, democracy decays and authoritarianism takes over. — Earl Warren

Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn. — Thomas B. Macaulay

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust — Vladimir Nabokov

You really are a soul caged in a human body. The body decays but the soul is everlasting. Leave a legacy you can be proud of. Make a difference in this world now while you still can. Even after you have left your soul shall remain. You will still know. — Sohail Mahmood

Everyone lives through this difficult period. For the average person it's the point in his life when the demands of his own life clash most violently with the world around him, when his forward path must be fought for most bitterly. Many experience this death and rebirth, which are our destiny, only this once in their life, when childhood decays and slowly disintegrates, when all that has become dear to us is about to leave us and we suddenly feel the solitude and deathly chill of outer space around us. And very many are hung up for good on this reef and for the rest of their life cling painfully to the irretrievable past, to the dream of the lost paradise, which is the worst and most murderous of all dreams. — Hermann Hesse

This which you see before you is merely the Khat, 'that which decays', the physical body that contained the Khaibit or shadow body which has now dissolved, and the Ka, or 'double'. — Max Overton

As the gentleman decays, the lady survives as the strongest evidence of his former predominance. — Emily James Smith Putnam

Whether the proton decays or not is not known. To prove that it does not decay is very difficult. — Richard Feynman

Surely revival delays because prayer decays. — Leonard Ravenhill

During this period, with a series of excellent students, we further studied hyperon decays. — James Cronin

All decays begin in the closet; no heart thrives with out much secret converse with God, and nothing will make amends for the want of it. — John Berridge

Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The porcelain rose is not as pretty as the one that decays. — Eric G. Wilson

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays. — Ezra Pound

To wonder where the mind goes after the brain decays is as silly as asking where the 70-miles-per-hour have gone after a speeding auto has crashed into a tree. — Frank Zindler

Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flames to freeze, and ice to boil. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 of thought. They drove me distracted while I was having influenza, gazing at me with large eyes and saying: O Sylvia, you are so ill, you'll soon be dead. And who will feed us then? Feed us now! — Sylvia Townsend Warner

It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Rooms don't change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays. — Graham Greene

The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted. — Roman Payne

What an odd thing a stranger is. A stranger sleeping next to you. I listen to his breathing as if it were his entire life, with its hidden processes, the pulsing of the blood in the tissues, with thousands of tiny hidden decays and combustions, which together create and maintain him. — Mihail Sebastian

There is a story of some mountains of salt in Cumana, which never diminished, though carried away in much abundance by merchants; but when once they were monopolized to the benefit of a private purse, then the salt decreased; till afterward all were allowed to take of it, when it had a new access and increase. The truth of this story may be uncertain, but the application is true; he that envies others the use of his gifts decays then, but he thrives most that is most diffusive. — Herbert Spencer

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse. — Robert Musil

For in this worldof ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind, still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief. — Marcel Proust

The soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God's organic will, which rules and moulds this universe. — James Anthony Froude

In human life there is constant change of fortune; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate. Life itself decays, and all things are daily changing. — Plutarch

Nothing can be plainer, than that the motions, changes, decays, and dissolutions, which we hourly see befall natural bodies (and which is what we mean by the course of nature), cannot possibly affect an active, simple, uncompounded substance: such a being therefore is indissoluble by the force of nature, that is to say, the soul of man is naturally immortal. — George Berkeley