Famous quotes containing the words birth, rate and/or decline:
“The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)