We study relations between the decaying rates of operator semigroups on Hilbert spaces and some spectral properties of their respective generators; in particular, we show that the decaying rates of orbits of semigroups which are stable but not exponentially stable, typically in Baire's sense, depend on sequences of time going to infinity. * Corresponding author. Telephone +55 16 3351 9153, fax +55 16 3361 2081. applications of the theory to PDEs; namely, estimates on the norm of the resolvent of the generator are often easier to compute than the estimates on the norm of the semigroup itself. In this context, we refer to [1,3,7,8,16], among others. An important intermediate step from Gearhart-Prüss Theorem to results by Rozendaal et al. [16] was the Batty-Duyckaerts Theorem (Theorem 1.1 below) which relates the decaying rates of T (t)A −1 B(X) , iR ⊂ ̺(A), with the arbitrary growth of the norm of the resolvent of the generator. In order to properly recall such result, we need some preliminaries. For every A, the generator of a bounded C 0 -semigroup (T (t)) t≥0 on a Banach space X, with iR ⊂ ̺(A), consider a continuous non-decreasing function M (y) := max λ∈[−y,y] R(iλ, A) B(X) , y ≥ 0, and the associated function M log (y) := M (y)(log(1 + M (y)) + log(1 + y)), y ≥ 0. Denote by M −1 log : [M log (0), ∞) → R the inverse of M log .Theorem 1.1 (Theorem 1.5 in [4]). Let (T (t)) t≥0 be a bounded C 0 -semigroup on a Banach space X, with generator A such that iR ⊂ ̺(A). Then, there exists C > 0 such that