A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.
Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.
It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.
Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
God's mercy on you degenerate swine.
Emigrate or Degenerate.
We have either to progress or to degenerate. Our ancestors did great things in the past, but we have to grow into a fuller life and march beyond even their great achievements.
Where flowers degenerate man cannot live.
Prudence is a necessary ingredient in all the virtues, without which they degenerate into folly and excess.
Change is almost always negative. Things degenerate.
Just as the body has its progress and decadence, so also has the mind, and, therefore, the mind is not the soul, because the soul can neither decay nor degenerate.
Frugality and economy are virtues without which no household can prosper. Whatever the income, waste of all kinds should be most sternly repressed. . . Economy and frugality must never, however, be allowed to degenerate into meanness.
There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis.
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
The boys at school are so degenerate that it makes one feel pessimistic about the future of the male gender in general.
James Bond in his Sean Connery days. . . was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.
Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy.
There is a clear acknowledgement all over the world that we should not teach people to read and then to leave them without literature. For they would then relapse into a dreary and ultimately dangerous state of half-education, in which they would be easily satisfied by crude semi-pictorial approximations of the strip cartoon and by the abundant supply of degenerate literature which destroys, rather than promotes, a capacity to face the problems of the world with skill and courage
It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.
The main problem is that most commentators are accustomed to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and especially upon repetition and the application of continual and standardised pressures upon their followers. The Sufi way, except in degenerate forms which are not to be classified as Sufic, is entirely different from this.