Decrepit Quotes

• The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three...And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Live Life, Mean, Years

  17 Copy quote

• I don't know if I've come of age, but I'm certainly older now. I feel shrunken, as if there's a tiny ancient Oliver Tate inside me operating the levers of a life-size Oliver-shaped shell. A shell on which a decrepit picture show replays the same handful of images. Every night I come to the same place and wait till the sky catches up with my mood. The pattern is set. This is, no doubt, the end.

  Joe Dunthorne

  Night, Sky, Waiting

  17 Copy quote

• The aim is to postpone frailty, postpone degenerative disease, debilitation and so on and thereby shorten the period at the end of life, which is passed in a decrepit or disabled state, while extending life as a whole.

  Aubrey de Grey

  Disease, End Of Life, Periods

  "The ideas interview: Aubrey de Grey". Interview with John Sutherland, www.theguardian.com. March 27, 2006.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Why you decrepit old mage! You couldn't turn water into ice in the dead of winter!

  Margaret Weis

  Winter, Ice, Water

  Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman (2006). “Dragonlance Chronicles”

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm decrepit but I don't want to give up, and I love my work.

  Helen Thomas

  Giving Up, Giving, Want

  11 Copy quote

• A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Society, Individual

  Malcolm Muggeridge (1966). “The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

  Michelle Alexander

  School, Years, Cities

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.150, The New Press

  97 Copy quote

  Show source

• How can I tolerate the slightest inconvenience to them, the women, the children, the sick, the aged, the blind, the decrepit, that come for counsel, consolation, courage and cure?.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Children, Sick, Blind

  7 Copy quote

• And what's a life? - a weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.

  Francis Quarles

  Childhood, Age, One Day

  Francis Quarles (1807). “Judgment and Mercy for Afflicted Souls: Or, Meditations, Soliloquies, and Prayers. New Ed., with a Biographical and Critical Introd. by Reginalde Wolfe”, p.30

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is room in our ranks for the old and decrepit, as well as the young and vigorous.

  Gerrit Smith

  Rooms, Young, Wells

  7 Copy quote

• When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.

  Milton Friedman

  Years, Two, Political

  Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.42, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ideal state is meekness, or humility, or the semi-invalid state of the old. Year after year I am becoming nobler and nobler. If I can live to be decrepit enough, I shall be a saint.

  Charles Fort

  Humility, Years, Old Year

  Charles Fort (2014). “Wild Talents”, p.49, Baen Publishing Enterprises

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.

  W. G. Sebald

  Wall, Iron, Broken

  15 Copy quote

• I would take school instruction out of the hands of the old order of decrepit, stammering, journeymen-teachers as well as from the new weak ones, who are generally no better for popular instruction, and entrust it to the undivided powers of Nature herself, to the light that God kindles and ever keeps alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interest of parents who desire that their children should grow up in favour with God and man.

  Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

  Mother, Teacher, Children

  81 Copy quote

• The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  World, Grey

  1851 The House of the Seven Gables, ch.12.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, dungeon or beggary, or decrepit age! Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct, and all her various objects of delight annulled, which might in part my grief have eased. Inferior to the vilest now become of man or worm; the vilest here excel me, they creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed to daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, within doors, or without, still as a fool, in power of others, never in my own; scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

  John Milton

  Grief, Loss, Dark

  John Milton (1853). “The poetical works of John Milton, with life. Complete ed”, p.359

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!

  John Milton

  Loss, Sight, Enemy

  1671 Samson Agonistes, l.67-79.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

  George Eliot

  Funny, Happy Birthday, Time

  61 Copy quote

• As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

  William Shakespeare

  Children, Father, Comfort

  Sonnet 37

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The voting booth joint is a great leveler; the whole neighborhood - rich, poor, old, young, decrepit and spunky - they all turn out in one day.

  David Byrne

  Voting, One Day, Rich Poor

  7 Copy quote

• If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Inspirational Life, Wish, Together

  "Man's Search For Meaning".

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is a splendid thing to think that the woman you really love will never grow old to you. Through the wrinkles of time, through the mask of years, if you really love her, you will always see the face you love and won. And a woman who really loves a man does not see that he grows old; he is not decrepit to her; she always sees the same gallant gentleman who won her hand and heart.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Heart, Men, Thinking

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.209, Library of Alexandria

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Reading, Men, Healthy

  Jerome K. Jerome (2014). “Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog”, p.11, Diderot Publishing

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

  Henry Miller

  Men, Class, Waiting

  9 Copy quote

• Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter - which is the door of death - but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Wise, Autumn, Winter

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making”, p.141, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

  Show source