Stagnation Quotes

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Verily, I do not want to be like the ropemakers: They drag out their threads and always walk backwards.

I have no intention of being a potted plant, and just getting watered every so often.

The trap for an actor is that you become too successful at what you're trying to do, and you can find yourself stuck there.

If you mean whose side one should be on, Israel or the Arabs, I would certainly say Israel because it’s the advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because it’s bringing industry, intelligence, and modern technology into their stagnation..

The reason I became 297 pounds is because that was comfortable. What was very uncomfortable was running. What was very uncomfortable was being on a diet. What was very uncomfortable was trying to face things that I didn't want to face. And I also realized, when I was really big, I had no growth. Why? Because I was living comfortable.

A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing grows there.

Comfort can be a dangerous thing. You stick around home all the time where it’s safe and nothing ever changes, and before you know it, you get set in your ways and you quit learning, you quit changing, you don’t grow anymore.

On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.

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

Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75.

I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.

I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all - they are attempting nothing new.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

Complacency is almost always the product of success or perceived success

When you stop growing you start dying.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

It's depression. You can't put it into words. You get stuck and time passes by. I'm stood there on the edge of a cliff, can't go back and can't go forward. Days go by. I'm still in the same place. Everyone else's life goes on, but you're stuck. You try and try and try and I don't know how, but you came out of it eventually.

Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Nobody ever died of discomfort, yet living in the name of comfort has killed more ideas, more opportunities, more actions, and more growth than everything else combined. Comfort kills!

If there wasn't any competition, I'd be very worried, because it would mean we were not doing very well.

What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.