The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.
Inaction saps the vigor of the mind.
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Sometimes, when you're really depressed, all you want to do is nothing. All you want to do is lean your head on your arm, and stare into space. Sometimes this can go on for hours. If you're unusually depressed, you may have to change arms.
Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
Depression is inertia.
Our minds are as much given to laziness as our bodies.
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper
We all dread a bodily paralysis, and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it; but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul.
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
Sloth is sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good...it is evil in its effect, if it so oppresses man as to draw him away entirely from good deeds.
The longer you're stuck in a position that doesn't truly challenge you, the less likely you'll be able to leave it. Inertia, in fact, is one of my worst fears.
Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
The most difficult thing to get people to do is to accept the obvious.
... my mind lay limp in an empty world.
Sloth is the torpidity of the mental faculties; the sluggard is a living insensible.
Mental inertia is death.
Often, psychological laziness will have you switch your life over to autopilot and fall asleep at the wheel rather than stay awake to what will fulfill your heart's deepest desires and your soul's purpose.
When does he ever think?" Richard straddled a chair and accepted a wind cup from Raoul. "If he were to sell his brain, he could claim it had never been used.", Chapter 7
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
If it required some effort to go from today to tomorrow, some people would always remain in yesterday.
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
