Atrophy Quotes - Page 3

• There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition. . .

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Commitment, Math, Exercise

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• I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Believe, Writing, Creativity

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• Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some variety of infirmity is a death, a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves, or a dynamo governing a particular sensibility or intelligence and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.

  Coleman Dowell

  Death, Block, Loss

  "Mrs. October was Here".

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• The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

  Ezra Pound

  Music, New Year, Taken

  ABC of Reading (1934) "Warning"

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• Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Believe, Men, Soul

  Thomas Carlyle, Edwin Markham (1842). “On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History: Six Lectures, Reported, with Emendations and Additions”, p.215

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• 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.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Men, Should Have

  Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Darwin (1898). “The life and letters of Charles Darwin...ed. by his son, Francis Darwin. 2 v”

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• To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.

  Irving Kaufman

  History, Perspective, Mind

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• There's a lot of different kinds of success. I'm so dedicated to the making of the art that the rest of my life atrophies, unfortunately.

  Jim Shaw

  Art, Different, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.

  Mary Schmich

  Phones, Cells, Skills

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• Observation is like a muscle. It grows stronger with use and atrophies without use. Exercise your observation muscle and you will become a more powerful decoder of the world around you.

  Joe Navarro

  Powerful, Exercise, Stronger

  Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins (2009). “What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Differences, Alternatives, Dimensions

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.82, Routledge

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• Ability is not something to be saved, like money, in the hope that you can draw interest on it. The interest comes from the spending. Unused ability, like unused muscles, will atrophy. It is tragic to realize that the majority of human beings, even the so-called educated, call upon only the smallest fraction of their potential capacity. They leave many talents dormant. They fail to develop their mental qualities. They are almost unaware of the degree of energy upon which they might call to build a full and rewarding life.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Quality, Might, Energy

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• Recipients of transfers tend to become less self-reliant and more dependent on government payments. When people can get support without exercising their own abilities to discover and respond to opportunities for earning income, those abilities atrophy. People forget - or never learn in the first place - how to help themselves, and eventually some of them simply accept their helplessness.

  Robert Higgs

  Exercise, Opportunity, Government

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• If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won't go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed. Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

  Mitt Romney

  Goodbye, Jobs, Suicidal

  "Let Detroit go bankrupt". www.nytimes.com. November 18, 2008.

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• Personally, I've never understood inactivity. Why a person would sit when he could soar, be a spectator when he could play, or atrophy when he could develop...is beyond me!

  Bill Hybels

  Play, Soar, Spectators

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• If we are not using our brains' capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle.

  Philippa Perry

  Challenges, Brain, Capacity

  Source: bigthink.com

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• You have to move so you don't die. You have to move so your brain doesn't atrophy. You have to move so that you look a little bit like a person that you might want to be. There are a thousand reasons why exercise is important, and I've had to find ways to make it sexy for myself.

  Lena Dunham

  Sexy, Moving, Exercise

  Interview with Allison Glock, www.espn.com. September 21, 2015.

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• I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

  Brian Eno

  Thinking, People, Aspect

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

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• For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.

  Anais Nin

  Art, Powerful, Giving

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• There is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them.

  Jason Silva

  Writing, Technology, Hands

  Source: alejandrotrojas.com

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• 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.

  Jerry Lewis

  Thinking, Laughing, People

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• The greatest tragedy that can befall a person is the atrophy of his mind.

  Zhuangzi

  Mind, Tragedy, Persons

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• The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy.

  Marcel Proust

  Aunt, Two, Suffering

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• I do think the Cubans have to change some of the political structures there and allow critical voices, for their own sakes, because unless there is accountability the revolution will totally atrophy.

  Tariq Ali

  Thinking, Voice, Accountability

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.

  Thomas Bernhard

  Character, People, Boring

  Thomas Bernhard (2013). “Extinction: A Novel”, p.115, Vintage

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