“All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.”

No government has ever been, or can ever be, wherein time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost.

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

If passion rules, how weak does reason prove!

So softly death succeeded life in her, She did but dream of heaven, and she was there.

Fool that I was, upon my eagle’s wings I bore this wren, till I was tired with soaring, and now he mounts above me.

Death ends our woes, and the kind grave shuts up the mournful scene.

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

But love’s a malady without a cure.

We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure.

I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five-and-twenty.

There is a pleasure in being mad, which none but madmen know.

None are so busy as the fool and the knave.

Pains of love be sweeter far than all other pleasures are.

He who would pry behind the scenes oft sees a counterfeit.

Sure there’s contagion in the tears of friends.

Everything that makes diversity of kinds, of species, differences, properties… everything that consists in generation, decay, alteration and change is not an entity, but a condition and circumstance of entity and being, which is one, infinite, immobile, subject, matter, life, death, truth, lies, good and evil.

A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.

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

Without publicity there can be no public support, and without public support every nation must decay.

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

A society like ours, which professes no one religion and has allowed all religions to decay, which indulges freedom to the point of license and individualism to the point of anarchy, needs all the support that responsible, cultivated homes can furnish. I hope your generation will provide a firmer shelter for civilized standards.

Either you’re growing or you’re decaying; there’s no middle ground. If you’re standing still, you’re decaying.

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