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| Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922. |
| Decay |
| You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone? Of two such lessons, why forget The nobler and the manlier one? You have the letters Cadmus gave— Think ye he meant them for a slave? Byron—Don Juan. Canto III. St. 86. 10. | 1 |
| A gilded halo hovering round decay. Byron—Giaour. L. 100. | 2 |
| He that loves a rosy cheek, Or a coral lip admires, Or from star-like eyes doth seek Fuel to maintain his fires;— As old Time makes these decay, So his flames must waste away. Thomas Carew—Disdain Returned. | 3 |
| A worm is in the bud of youth, And at the root of age. Cowper—Stanzas Subjoined to a Bill of Mortality. | 4 |
| An age that melts with unperceiv’d decay, And glides in modest innocence away. Samuel Johnson—Vanity of Human Wishes. L. 293. | 5 |
| There seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas; even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive, so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercises of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. Locke—Human Understanding. Bk. II. Ch. 10. | 6 |
| All that’s bright must fade,— The brightest still the fleetest; All that’s sweet was made But to be lost when sweetest. Moore—National Airs. Indian Air. | 7 |
| The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he; His time is spent. Richard II. Act II. Sc. 1. L. 153. | 8 |
| As is the bud bit with an envious worm, Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air, Or dedicate his beauty to the sun. Romeo and Juliet. Act I. Sc. 1. L. 157. (Folio and earlier editions give “same” for “sun.”) | 9 |
| In the sweetest bud The eating canker dwells. Two Gentlemen of Verona. Act I. Sc. 1. L. 42. | 10 |
| I shall be like that tree,—I shall die at the top. Swift—Scott’s Life of Swift. | 11 |
| Fires that shook me once, but now to silent ashes fall’n away. Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day. Tennyson—Locksley Hall. Sixty Years After. St. 21. | 12 |
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