Selected stagnation quotes

1. Thoughts shut up want air, And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.

2. Government [is] operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

3. You won't skid if you stay in a rut.

4. I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.

5. The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

6. It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

7. The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

8. Action is the parent of results; dormancy, the brooding mother of discontent.

9. Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification. They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

10. As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

11. It's never happened in World Series competition, and it still hasn't.

12. Perhaps I'm hiding from myself. Perhaps I don't want to be what I'm supposed to be. Or perhaps I don't want to keep living the life I already started to live

13. Sometimes I get this crazy dream And I just take off in my car But you can travel on ten thousand miles And still stay where you are.

14. The trouble is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.

15. Something has to make you run I don't know why I didn't come

16. China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times. It had perhaps, even long before his time, acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire:The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe.

17. The plum tree in the yard's so small It's hardly like a tree at all. Yet there it is, railed round To keep it safe and sound. The poor thing can't grow any more Though if it could it would for sure. There's nothing to be done It gets too little sun.

18. A martial artist who drills exclusively to a set pattern of combat is losing his freedom. He is actually becoming a slave to a choice pattern and feels that the pattern is the real thing. It leads to stagnation because the way of combat is never based on personal choice and fancies, but constantly changes from moment to moment, and the disappointed combatant will soon find out that his 'choice routine' lacks pliability. There must be a 'being' instead of a 'doing' in training. One must be free. Instead of complexity of form, there should be simplicity of expression.

19. Change: 'Leave room for other possibilities in your life. When we have made up our minds about something or someone, we often never revisit the circumstances that led us to our conclusions. People change and so do situations, as most situations are comprised of people's lives. When we leave no room in our lives for other possibilities we are sometimes left behind, for we stand still while the world is transformed around us.'

20. Bored in a role, but he can't stop Standing up to sit back down, and lose the one thing found. Spinning the world like a toy top 'till there's a ghost in every town.

21. (after playing 'In a Rut' by The Ruts) - I think it's fair to say that modern music is back in that rut again, actually, lots of beautiful youths in meaningful trousers.

22. We know all our lines so well... We've said them so many times: Time and time again, Line and line again.

23. It's to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images.

24. I see no changes. Wake up in the morning and I ask myself/'Is life worth living? Should I blast myself?'

25. Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

26. I've always maintained that you can't just coast, if you do, you go backwards. It's just a slow way of liquidating... Let's do anything to get some action, you see?

27. The absolute and static were even taken over by such dynamically oriented psychological schools as the Freudian in the form of the permanent unconscious ideas. In Jung, the unconscious psychic life was enlarged to the static 'racial unconscious' and to the static 'collective unconscious'. Along with the static viewpoint, these psychologies took over the idea of guilt, even after their separation from philosophy. In so doing, they fell into a cul de sac from which there was no way out.

28. Lost in a gloom of uninspired research.

29. We have come one hundred miles and both the tortoise and the hare have passes us laughing.

30. If you get tired of just hanging around Pick up a guitar, spin a web of sound And then you could be strung out all day With lovers and clowns Now I find myself still hanging around

31. I see no changes all I see is racist faces/misplaced hate makes disgrace to races

32. But some things will never change/try to show another way but you stayin' in the dope game

33. I'm sittin' here backed up and blue.

34. Nothing happens, twice.

35. No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

36. You sittin' here chained to your rockin' chair.

37. ?Que inventen ellos!