Mental Exercise Quotes

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

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

Writing is sort of like chess for me. You have to think carefully before you move, thinking, planning.

The mind is just another muscle.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.

Chess is a game of stimulation.

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

I used to be a great fan of doing crosswords. When you're fiddling around with anagrams, you get wonderful jumbles of syllables that become interesting.

My brain's always working, and gears are turning 24/7. So I was trying to think of solutions.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

If a brain is exercised properly, anyone can grow intelligence, at any age, and potentially by a lot. Or you can just let your brain idle - and watch it slowly, inexorably, go to seed like a sedentary body.

'Penny for Your Thoughts' was something I noodled on for a while.

Developing inner values is much like physical exercise. The more we train our abilities, the stronger they become. The difference is that, unlike the body, when it comes to training the mind, there is no limit to how far we can go.

Thinking has become a superfluous exercise... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game.

Academical disputation gives vigor and briskness to the mind thus exercised, and relieves the languor of private study and meditation.

Playing 'Tetris' for 15 minutes is like meditation.

We've forgotten how to remember, and just as importantly, we've forgotten how to pay attention. So, instead of using your smartphone to jot down crucial notes, or Googling an elusive fact, use every opportunity to practice your memory skills. Memory is a muscle, to be exercised and improved.

You can have fun, but you also have to put on your thinking cap every day.

Every film has a lot of questions that you don't know the answer to, and you just hope that you figure it out. But I tend to like things that are hard; I don't know why.

Learning ballroom dancing is great for your brain. But it only works for three to six months. After that, you've got all the benefit you can get, and so you have to move on to yoga, and then Tai Chi, and then bridge, always keeping on the steep part of the learning curve.

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

When I first retired, I had short-term memory loss, and I started reading about neuroplasticity in the brain, about how the brain can regenerate itself, and I don't know if it can or not.