Quotes About Inertia

Authentic Christianity has a horror of the pessimism of inertia. It is pessimist, profoundly pessimist in the sense that it knows that the creature comes from nothingness, and that all that issues from nothing essentially tends of itself to return to nothing: but it's optimism is incomparably deeper than it's pessimism; for it knows that the creature comes from God, and all that comes from God tends to return to Him.

Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means "dead hand." Its definition is: "The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present." (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning.

Nadie quiere cambiar las cosas?

Life went on whether a person participated in it or not.

If they finally move, is it because they are warm enough, or is it that they are stiff, or bored?

The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers.

Excellence when concealed, differs but little from buried worthlessness. [Lat., Paullum sepultae distat inertiae Celata virtus.]

We must renew democracy itself. We have to fight cynicism and inertia and restore faith in the advancement of our country.

To be depressed is, very simply, to be stopped short in one's life.

I think one person's courage can defeat the complacency of a thousand others.

one person's courage can defeat the complacency of a thousand others.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

My body, still too heavy with sleep to move...

This should come as no surprise. Intellectual, social, and political inertia are normally powerful forces. Modern thought and institutions, evolved and nurtured in the late Holocene, fit comfortably with a world of cheap energy and stable climate.

Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

Fear is better than apathy because fear makes us do something.

Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said.

The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.

Ai, que preguiça!

I yearned for lightness; I still yearn for lightness. Lightness is freedom -- freedom from the heaviness of too much stuff, too many words, too heavy a pull toward inertia. I feared being buried in stone -- becoming stone.