Degenerate Quotes

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book(Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom(when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this(or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. - Anais Nin

Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me? / For though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord GOD. - Bible

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

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

We will briefly mention some peculiarities frequently manifested by a degenerate. He is tormented by doubts, seeks for the basis of all phenomena, especially those whose first causes are completely inaccessible to us, and is unhappy when his inquiries and ruminations lead, as is natural, to no result. - Max Nordau

We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused / in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery / by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press / their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner. - Edgar Allan Poe

We have done everything to restore calm and avoid a battle between (Palestinian) groups. We will not allow this to degenerate into a civil war. - Mahmud Abbas

We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. - Oscar Wilde

We cannot accept it when disappointment degenerates into violence. - Giacinto Facchetti

We can have discussion without letting it degenerate into personal attacks. - Peter Post