Fair flower, that dost so comely grow, Hid in this silent, dull retreat, Untouched thy honied blossoms blow, Unseen thy little branches greet; ...No roving foot shall crush thee here, ...No busy hand provoke a tear. By Nature's self in white arrayed, She bade thee shun the vulgar eye, And planted here the gaurdian shade, And sent soft waters murmuring by; ...Thus quietly thy summer goes, ...Thy days declinging to repose. Smit with those charms, that must decay, I grieve to see your future doom; They died--nor were those flowers more gay, The flowers that did in Eden bloom; ...Unpitying frosts, and Autumn's power ...Shall leave no vestige of this flower. From morning suns and evenign dews At first thy little being came: If nothing once, you nothing lose, For when you die you are the same; ...The space between, is but an hour, ...The frail duration of a flower.

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

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Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last!

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Every winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into a vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay-- Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.

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Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ill a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay Princes and Lords may flourish, or may fade A breath can make them, as a breath has made but a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed can never be supplied.

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Since moons decay and suns decline, How else should end this life of mine?

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It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, alrea...

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All human things are subject to decay, And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey; This Flecknoe found, who like Augustus young Was call'd to empire, and had govern'd long: In prose and verse, was own'd, without dispute Through all the realms of nonsense, absolute.

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All human things are subject to decay,And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obeyThis Flecknoe found, who like Augustus youngWas call'd to empire, and had govern'd longIn prose and verse, was own'd, without disputeThrough all the realms of nonsense, absolute.

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We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.

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And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways', Yossarian continued 'There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?

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That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much revernece can you have for a supreme being who finds it necassary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His system of creation?

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A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

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Time drops in decay, Like a candle burnt out, And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day....

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To that high Capital, where kingly Death Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, He came.

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The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,...

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You shall go with me, newly-married bride, And gaze upon a merrier multitude. White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds, Feachra of the hurtling form, and him Who is the ruler of the Western Host, Finvara, and their Land of Heart's Desire. Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

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But the best I've known Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown...

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Fascism is capitalism in decay.

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And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

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Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.

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It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilisation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.

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Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

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Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay? Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;...

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You shall go with me, newly-married bride,And gaze upon a merrier multitude.White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,Feachra of the hurtling form, and himWho is the ruler of the Western Host,Finvara, and their Land of Heart's Desire.Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

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Just like those other black holes from outer space, Hollywood is postmodern to this extent: it has no center, only a spreading dead zone of exhaustion, inertia, and brilliant decay.

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The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

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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 it on a little chair and say, 'You'll have three score years and ten,' and take a photograph every minute. 'And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film.' Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.

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Time drops in decay, Like a candle burnt out, And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day;

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Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification. They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

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