Stagnation Quotes

Business men go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. One sees them all about - men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year's ideas.

Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.

A leader who loves status quo soon becomes a follower.

Slater soaks into the mind as water into low and marshy places, where it becomes stagnant and offensive.

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

Shri Ramakrishna use to say, "As Long as I Live, so long do I learn". That man or that society which has nothing to learn is already in the jaws of death.

When your through changing, your through!

If you don't keep pushing the limits, you wake up one day and you're the "center square to block."

We bring forth weeds when our quick minds lie still.

Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?

And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.

Neglecting to broaden their view has kept some people doing one thing all their lives.

We're going forward, but nothing changes.

There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

When you are finished changing, you are finished.

People feel guilty. And guilt is stymieing. Guilt immobilizes. Guilt closes the air ducts and the veins, and makes people ignorant.

Gray day. Everything is gray. I watch. But nothing moves today.

The softminded person always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness.

A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen.

If you are not growing, you are dying.

It's not easy for me to admit that I've been standing in the same place for 18 years.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.

If you are not moving forward, the world is passing you by.

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

Everything that Mr Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly.

Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can only grow as long as we are interested.

When you are through trying to improve, you are through.

To stand still is to fall behind.

All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man's life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.

Leaving the broken system the way it is, that`s not a solution.

Democracy cannot be static. Whatever is static is dead.

This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

The man who is too set to change is dead already. The funeral is a mere detail.

Every person should make it his business to gather new ideas from sources other than the environment in which he daily lives and works. The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

A school of art or of anything else is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly.

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.

Time was not passing...it was turning in a circle.

Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.

The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time; or we shall stick in the mud.

Courage is in the air in bracing whiffsBetter than all the stalemate an's and ifs.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.

Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die. But when a business ceases to be creative, when it believes it has reached perfection and needs to do nothing but produce no improvement, no development, it is done

A person who refuses to risk change fails to grow.