Gary Shteyngart Quotes

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something.

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.

The day you think you know, your death has happened - because now there will be no wonder and no joy and no surprise. Now you will live a dead life.

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

For me, curiosity is life. If you are not curious, you are in your coffin.

Inactivity is death.

Life is about learning; when you stop learning, you die.

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

If there wasn't mystery, people wouldn't have anything to ponder. If you already knew everything, you wouldn't have anything to think about and life would just be really boring.

The day you stop learning and creating must be the most boring day.

So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy, and to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil.

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

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.

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.

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.

Inaction saps the vigor of the mind.

I wouldn't say we were doing that. I think we probably stopped thinking. Though it took a while to stop thinking.

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.

Mental inertia is death.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.

Think and wonder, wonder and think.

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.

Nothing is more tragic - or more common - than mental inertia.