Personal Decline Quotes

It is a different world than when I was growing up, and you started to just kind of maintain at thirty-five and just hope you can hope it together. People are a lot more vital than I am and doing all kinds of things and leading really important movements.

I ain't as good as I once was, But I'm as good once as I ever was.

I believe that I am past my prime. I had reckoned on my prime lasting till I was at least fifty.

Over his shoulder I saw a star fall. It was me.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than ever wars or sudden deaths do.

Peevishness may be considered the canker of life, that destroys its vigor and checks its improvement; that creeps on with hourly depredations, and taints and vitiates what it cannot consume.

My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.

Around 2015, I started to see my skills diminish. It happens to everybody. Father Time is undefeated. He is gonna win every time, and I saw him catching me.

My declining allure is a source of great sadness to me.

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

My professional life, in a strange way, has always been going up, up, up, while my personal life was just the complete opposite.

There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated

I miss the movies. Still, I understood that my kind of movie has had its day. I thought it was over for me.

I've come down in the world. I've slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn't much room for me to move.Most of the time I'm used to it ... I accepted my sentence and do not brood or look back. But sometimes a shift makes me remember. Routine is ruffled and a new start makes me suddenly conscious of what I've become -

An addict never stops growing. Stupider.

I am no longer a divine biped. I am no longer the freest German after Goethe, as Ruge named me in healthier days. I am no longer the great hero No. 2, who was compared with the grape-crowned Dionysius, whilst my colleague No. 1 enjoyed the title of a Grand Ducal Weimarian Jupiter. I am no longer a joyous, somewhat corpulent Hellenist, laughing cheerfully down upon the melancholy Nazarenes. I am now a poor fatally-ill Jew, an emaciated picture of woe, an unhappy man.

John ain't been worth a damn since he started wearing $300 suits.

Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.

Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.

I studied well, and I was the leader among my friends. However, I started losing interests in everything, and started becoming more and more awkward from some point.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

Age doth not rectify, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits.