Mental Laziness Quotes

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences

Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

So little trouble do men take in the search after truth; so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand.

I never thought of that before! It's my opinion that you never think at all.

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.

Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness-lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

In making certain things easier for people, technology has actually demotivated people from using their brains. We have all these devices that keep us connected, and yet we're more disconnected than ever before. Why is that?

Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

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

Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion.

Our minds are lazier than our bodies.

People habituate themselves to let things pass through their minds, as one may speak, rather than to think of them. Thus by use they become satisfied merely with seeing what is said, without going any further. Review and attention, and even forming a judgment, becomes fatigue; and to lay anything before them that requires it, is putting them quite out of their way.

The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of [intellectual] sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity.

Our minds are as much given to laziness as our bodies.

Idleness is more an infirmity of the mind than of the body.