Mental Deterioration Quotes

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

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

It (masturbation) is called … ‘beastliness’, and this is about the best name for it…. Should it become a habit, it quickly destroys both health and spirits; he becomes feeble in body and mind, and often ends up in a lunatic asylum.

My grandfather said, "When you become senile, you won't know it."

When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balance without the pneumonia, he is pronounced insane by all smart doctors.

Some things get better with age, but after a certain point, the mind isn't among them.

My father started growing very quiet as Alzheimer's started claiming more of him. The early stages of Alzheimer's are the hardest because that person is aware that they're losing awareness. And I think that that's why my father started growing more and more quiet.

By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

As you get older; you've probably noticed that you tend to forget things. You'll be talking with somebody at a party, and you'll know that you know this person, but no matter how hard you try, you can't remember his or her name. This can be very embarassing, especially if he or she turns out to be your spouse.

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

There are three signs of senility. The first sign is that a man forgets his theorems. The second sign is that he forgets to zip up. The third sign is that he forgets to zip down.

Hunger steals the memory

Have you ever walked along a shoreline, only to have your footprints washed away? That's what Alzheimer's is like. The waves erase the marks we leave behind, all the sand castles. Some days are better than others.

The nuclear generator of brain sludge is television.

My mother wasn't rational those last years; if she had been, she would have been horrified by her own behavior.

If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.

The use it and lose it problem is pervasive, affecting more than 40,000 Californians a year.

There's no grand excellence to it. In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that'll kill you. You're just in this murk. And you're with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it's just like you're in this plastic bag and you can't quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it.

[General William Tecumseh] Sherman is gone in the head.

Finally I'm becoming stupider no more.

He suddenly became convinced that if he didn’t do something sensible, something to put his mind to some use, then before he knew it he would be wondering round the streets having fights with himself and inviting domestic animals to social occasions too.

What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

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

Can I remember exactly when I 'lost' my husband? Was it the moment when I had to start tying his shoelaces for him? Or when we stopped being able to laugh with each other? Looking back, that turning point is impossible to pinpoint. But then, that's the nature of dementia.