Mental Atrophy Quotes

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

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

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.

When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays.

If you think childlike, you'll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you're gunna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. You have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don't, it's going to come inside, your own poison, and it's over.

Just as the body has its progress and decadence, so also has the mind, and, therefore, the mind is not the soul, because the soul can neither decay nor degenerate.

Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.

One reason why men and women lose their heads so often is that they use them so little! It is the same with everything. If we have anything that is valuable, it must be put to some sort of use. If a man's muscles are neglected, he soon has none, or rather none worth mentioning. The more the mind is used the more flexible it becomes, and the more it takes upon itself new interests.

Nature takes away any faculty that is not used.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain that alone on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered, and if I had to live my life over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use.

Some people read so little they have rickets of the mind.

Just as iron which is not used grows rusty, and water putrefies and freezes in the cold, so the mind of which no use is made is spoilt.