Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

Just as iron which is not used grows rusty, and water putrefies and freezes in the cold, so the mind of which no use is made is spoilt.

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.

Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Inaction saps the vigor of the mind.

Idleness of the mind is much worse than that of the body: wit, without employment, is a disease - the rust of the soul, a plague, a hell itself.

If you rest, you rust.

A body that doesn't move mentally or physically dies.

Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness.

Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, - forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.

We notice that the mind grows with the body, and with it decays.

Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become - flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover ... not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life.

If we don't act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.

Indolence is the dry rot of even a good mind and a good character; the practical uselessness of both. It is the waste of what might be a happy and useful life.

Just as iron rusts from disuse... even so does inaction spoil the intellect.

The indolent mind is not empty, but full of vermin.

It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.

One's mind suffers only when one is young and while one is ignorant of the world. When one has lived for some time, one learns that the young think too little and the old too much, and one grows careless about both.

Sit a man on his ass with nothing to do but eat and the first thing that goes is his mind. It never fails.

It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness.

A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted-the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.

Just as I sit down to meditate, all the vilest subjects in the world come up. The whole thing is nauseating. Why should the mind think thoughts I do not want it to think? I am as it were a slave to the mind.