Mental Decay Quotes

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

The unfed mind devours itself.

Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.

An ill principle in the mind is worse than the matter of a disease in the body.

The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.

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

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.

Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!

Don't let despair mutate your flesh Look at my twisted stumps of thought See the fingers, listen to the voice I am slowly becoming the end of the line.

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.

We notice that the mind grows with the body, and with it decays.

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.

A lot of my past is gone from my mind.

I feel like an old boxer. The brain's gone, but I can still move around.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

If you got maggots in your brain, everything you think is gonna be rotten.

Today's brains are yesterday's mashed potatoes.

That folly of old age which is called dotage is peculiar to silly old men, not to age itself.

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

There is not a man who does not get senile by the time he reaches sixty. And when one thinks that he will not be senile, he is already so.

Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.