#degenerate

While I shared many of the same emotions Bill describes, in no way did my experience ever degenerate into the grimness I find in his book - I didn't have to live with Don, and I think that made a big big difference. ↗

— Gary Lucas

#big difference #bill #book #degenerate #describes

Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual, like a hide-bound chrysalis, should develop secret and self-contained, was perished in his case, as it were, to a semi-opaque suit, through which his soul gazed dimly and fearfully on its monstrous arbitrary surroundings. Not the mantle of the poet, philosopher, or artist fallen upon such, can still its shiverings, or give the comfort that Nature denies. Yet he was a little bit of each - poet, philosopher, and artist; a nerveless and self-deprecatory stalker of ideals, in the pursuit of which he would wear patent leather shoes and all the apologetic graces. The grandson of a 'three-bottle' J.P., who had upheld the dignity of the State constitution while abusing his own in the best spirit of squirearchy; the son of a petulant dyspeptic, who alternated seizures of long moroseness with fits of abject moral helplessnes, Amos found his inheritance in the reversion of a dissipated constitution, and an imagination as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Before he was thirty he was a neurasthenic so practised, as to have learned a sense of luxury in the very consciousness of his own suffering. It was a negative evolution from the instinct of self-protection - self-protection, as designed in this case, against the attacks of the unspeakable. ("The Accursed Cordonnier") ↗

— Bernard Capes

#decadent #degenerate #degeneration #neurasthenic #design

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. ↗

— Peter Drucker

#degenerate #good #good intentions #hard #hard work

Fear is proof of a degenerate mind. ↗

— Virgil

#fear #mind #proof

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs. ↗

— Simone Weil

#church #considered #degenerate #inevitably #into

Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction. ↗

— Franz Grillparzer

#conviction #convinced #degenerates #fools #however

The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls. ↗

— John Hersey

#blast #body #broke #burns #caused

It is simply the truth that the political system that I am part of has degenerated to the point that it needs fundamental change. ↗

— Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

#change #degenerated #fundamental #fundamental change #i

If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust. ↗

— Lord Chesterfield

#aside #breeding #coarse #contempt #days

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route. ↗

— Charles Eames

#architecture #degenerated #design #direct #idea