The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.
I had always been impressed by the fact that there are surprisingly many individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and yet are not stupid, and an equal number who obviously do use their minds but in an amazingly stupid way.
Then blessings on thee, my afternoon torpor Thou makest a prince of a mental porpor.
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are just putting us on [and acting stupid], or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Our minds are lazier than our bodies.
Idleness is more an infirmity of the mind than of the body.
We have more indolence in the mind than in the body.
We are lazier in our minds than in our bodies.
Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.
The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.
Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.
It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.
Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become - flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover ... not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness.
dead in the mind, meanin you're present but your ignorance only makes ur presense worse!
It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.
The 'We Have Overcome' generation has run out of intellectual creativity but refuses to leave the political stage.
No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person
There are lazy minds as well as lazy bodies.
Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.
Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind.
It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.
There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.
