Scepticism, 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other 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 ... 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or th...ey behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your mus...cles will atrophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the a...trophy of the child by darkness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 poetr...y 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's because ...many American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »