C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Decay
Mutability is written upon all things.
I sorrow that all fair things must decay.
A gilded halo hovering round decay.
Ruins in some countries indicate prosperity, in others decay.
Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.
Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten when their noblest and most enduring works decay?
Devouring Time and envious Age, all things yield to you; and with lingering death you destroy, step by step, with venomed tooth whatever you attack.
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.
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and, controversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?