Bodily Decay Quotes

You are a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.

A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist. The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation. If we couldn't have sex from time to time, what would life be? A futile struggle against joints that stiffen, caries that form. All of which, moreover, is as uninteresting as humanly possible - the collagen which makes muscles stiffen, the appearance of microbic cavities in the gums.

I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained of those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth and yet last the longest in the dust.

The body with its perfect mechanism loses power, magnetism, beauty, and brightness, when the soul departs from the body. This shows that the power, magnetism, beauty, and brightness belong to the soul.

We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.

But what was a body? Dust, dung, urine, itches. It was the light within which was important, and it was not significant if that light endured after death, or if the soul was blinded eternally in the endless night of the suspired flesh.

The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.

I like thinking about the fragility of the human flesh and our bodies - our decay and eventual death.

It's the decomposition that gets me. You spend your whole life looking after your body. And then you rot away.

it ultimately doesn't matter which disease gnaws away at the body - it looks the same. The flesh surrenders, grows exhausted, and the eyes ask why.

Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

From dust thou art to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.