Mental Stagnation Quotes

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

At present we educate people only up to the point where they can earn a living and marry; then education ceases altogether, as though a complete mental outfit had been acquired. ... Vast numbers of men and women thus spend their entire lives in complete ignorance of the most important things.

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

The day that you stop learning is the day that you start decreasing your rewards and start suffering from frustration and lower levels of satisfaction.

Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

When every man of liberality, firmness and penetration who cannot lick the hand stretched out to oppress, is deemed an enemy to the State—then is the gulph of despotism set open, and the grades to slavery, though rapid, are scarce perceptible—then genius drags heavily its iron chain — science is neglected, and real merit flies to the shades for security from reproach — the mind becomes enervated, and the national character sinks to a kind of apathy with only energy sufficient to curse the breast that gave it milk

Inaction saps the vigor of the mind.

Man, he is constantly growing and when he is bound by a set pattern of ideas or way of doing things, that's when he stops growing

Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

Too many people are too lazy to think. Instead of learning something new, they think the same thought day in day out.

Boredom is the deadliest poison.

All unlived emotions turn to inanity.

I'm tryin' to think, but nothin' happens!

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.

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

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

The intellectual bourgeois of the old Empire - tepid and unimaginative, mentally slow, arrogant, and incorrectly trained - has proven his incapacity to be the bearer of German culture. His benumbed world is now toppled, its spirit is overthrown, and is in the midst of being recast into a new mold.

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.

There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully.

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.