Decomposition Quotes

• Life is the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition at once general and continuous.

  Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville

  Life, Science, Movement

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• I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Eugenics, Kind, Chemicals

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• It's the decomposition that gets me. You spend your whole life looking after your body. And then you rot away.

  Brigitte Bardot

  Body, Whole Life, Whole

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• While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Children, People, Desire

  "The Good Society". Book by Robert Neelly Bellah, Richard Madsen, Steven M. Tipton, William M. Sullivan and Ann Swidler (Chapter 1), 1991.

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• Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  College, Nuclear Families, Social

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.42, Random House

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• The cycle of life is death, decomposition and regeneration, and a person who wants to stop killing animals is actually anti-life because it's only in death that life can be regenerated.

  Joel Salatin

  Animal, Cycle Of Life, Want

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• I will now direct the attention of scientists to a previously unnoticed cause which brings about the metamorphosis and decomposition phenomena which are usually called decay, putrefaction, rotting, fermentation and moldering. This cause is the ability possessed by a body engaged in decomposition or combination, i.e. in chemical action, to give rise in a body in contact with it the same ability to undergo the same change which it experiences itself.

  Justus von Liebig

  Science, Giving, Attention

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• It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

  Charles Dickens

  Evil, Hatred, Vices

  Charles Dickens (2001). “Hard Times”, p.52, Courier Corporation

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• In every combustion there is disengagement of the matter of fire or of light. A body can burn only in pure air [oxygen]. There is no destruction or decomposition of pure air and the increase in weight of the body burnt is exactly equal to the weight of air destroyed or decomposed. The body burnt changes into an acid by addition of the substance that increases its weight. Pure air is a compound of the matter of fire or of light with a base. In combustion the burning body removes the base, which it attracts more strongly than does the matter of heat, which appears as flame, heat and light.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Science, Fire, Light

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• Everything that comes together falls apart.

  John Green

  Hipster, Fall, Together

  John Green (2013). “The John Green Collection”, p.181, Penguin

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• Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Coffee, Fall, Black

  "Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within". Book by Natalie Goldberg, 1986.

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• I remain unconvinced that anything other than rapid decomposition is the fate of my body and mind after death.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Fate, Mind, Body

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. November 13, 2011.

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• In the primal state before any manifestation, when there was no motion but perfect balance, this Prakriti was indestructible, because decomposition or death comes from instability or change.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Perfect, Balance, States

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Practical Vedanta Philosophy”, p.98, editionNEXT.com

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• What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Dark, Media, Civilization

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• White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.

  Dieter Appelt

  Photography, Light, Color White

  Sylvia Wolf, Dieter Appelt, Wieland Schmied (1994). “Dieter Appelt”, Art Institute of Chicago

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• There are forces in nature called Love and Hate. The force of Love causes elements to be attracted to each other and to be built up into some particular form or person, and the force of Hate causes the decomposition of things.

  Empedocles

  Nature, Hate, Environmental

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• Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust.

  Stephen King

  Dust, Sky, Rose

  Stephen King (2014). “Pet Sematary”, p.63, Simon and Schuster

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• Even the most favorable outcome of the war will never lead to the decomposition of the main forces of Russia, which is based on millions of Russian ... The latter, even if they break up international treaties, just as quickly re-connect with each other, like pieces of a particle of mercury.

  Otto von Bismarck

  War, Russia, Pieces

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• Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

  James Joyce

  Ideas, Fire, Flames

  James Joyce (2005). “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, p.138, Collector's Library

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• But when it has been shown by the researches of Pasteur that the septic property of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition in the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles. Upon this principle I have based a practice.

  Joseph Lister

  Science, Air, Oxygen

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• We allowed ourselves to become particularly interested in research into the appearance of intermediate products of sugar decomposition during cell-free fermentation.

  Eduard Buchner

  Cells, Research, Sugar

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• There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.

  David Maraniss

  Cities, Balance, Dying

  David Maraniss (2016). “Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Capitalism Survive?—I have tried to show that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Form, Inevitable, Socialist

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2013). “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, p.410, Routledge

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• This new force, which was unknown until now, is common to organic and inorganic nature. I do not believe that this is a force entirely independent of the electrochemical affinities of matter; I believe, on the contrary, that it is only a new manifestation, but since we cannot see their connection and mutual dependence, it will be easier to designate it by a separate name. I will call this force catalytic force. Similarly, I will call the decomposition of bodies by this force catalysis, as one designates the decomposition of bodies by chemical affinity analysis.

  Jons Jacob Berzelius

  Believe, Independent, Science

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• Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness.

  Theodor Adorno

  Self, Evil, Matter

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.238, Verso

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