Inertia Quotes

1. "Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness."
Author: A.J. Jacobs

2. "We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side."
Author: Abhijit V. Banerjee

3. "If we always take the path of least resistance, if we embrace inertia, if we never leap, if we never accept accountability for our choices, how can we find any triumph in our victories or any remorse in our losses?"
Author: Allison Winn Scotch

4. "It was an alarming thought that these false selves should still have me in their power, and in my bewilderment I began wondering whether any such thing as my real self could be said to exist at all. Like a sudden revelation, then, it became clear to me that the self was always changing, always developing, only capable of evolving fully through the integration of all past semblances. I wouldn't be my true self till I accepted and learned to know all those selves I'd disowned and deserted...As if this were something I could do consciously, there and then, the last of my inertia vanished, consumed by an ardent desire for identification with the essential ‘I' – until this had been achieved I'd always be as I was now, wandering like a stranger, lost, frightened and confused, among the changes and contradictions of my own personality."
Author: Anna Kavan

5. "Freedom from activity is never achieved by abstaining from action. Nobody can become perfect by merely ceasing to act. In fact, nobody can ever rest from his activity even for a moment. All are helplessly forced to act. . . .A man who renounces certain physical actions but still lets his mind dwell on the objects of his sensual desire, is deceiving himself. He can only be called a hypocrite. The truly admirable man controls his senses by the power of his will. All his actions will be disinterested. Activity is better than inertia. Act, but with self-control. If you are lazy, you cannot even sustain your own body."
Author: Anonymous

6. "Those whom even love cannot shake from their habitual aversion to risk and inertia are those who are truly unredeemable."
Author: Cristina Nehring

7. "If you work hard in real life, people tend to get in your way - either from inertia or prejudice - and they stop you achieving things. It's the worst thing about real life compared with sports, where you generally get what you deserve: if you're the fastest guy, you win; there are no other games being played."
Author: Daley Thompson

8. "The real key is to live in an environment where the mind feels free to choose the right thing instead of being compelled by habit and inertia to choose the wrong thing."
Author: Deepak Chopra

9. "But the death of spirit goes by another name. It is usually called the birth of reason.The dreams of reason are, at this late date, everywhere to be seen, much like headstones in a cemetery. The inertia of a standard which prunes every tree to the dimensions of a utility pole will, with the same determination, core the heart out of the human personality. This fermenting mind, intoxicated by its heady sobriety, methodically slits its own throat, all the while mistaking the elongating wound for a smile.When the spirit is free, according to Nietzsche, the head will be the bowels of the heart. In these top heavy days that have turned life topsy-turvy the head has little appetite for freedom. Instead it has developed a taste for coprophagy."
Author: Ed Lawrence

10. "The principle of vis inertiae (...) seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed, and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress"
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

11. "My favorite "trick" is to stop writing at a point where I know that I can pick up easily the next day. I'll stop in mid-paragraph, often in midsentence. It makes getting out of bed so much easier, because I know that all I'll have to do to be productive is complete the sentence. And by then I'll be seated at my desk, coffee and Oreo cookie at hand, the morning's inertia overcome. There's an added advantage: The human brain hates incomplete sentences. All night my mind will have secretly worked on the passage and likely mapped out the remainder of the page, even the chapter, while simultaneously sending me on a dinner date with Cate Blanchett."
Author: Erik Larson

12. "The notion of Local Inertial Frame is crucial to understanding Nature and, in particular, General Relativity. Notwithstanding, very few popular science books (not even textbooks) emphasize enough its fundamental character."
Author: Felix Alba Juez

13. "The objective and merit of Einstein's theory is to identify those physical magnitudes which are absolute, i.e. common for all Inertial Frames, distinguishing them from those which are a mere perspective, only shared by those observers in repose within a given Inertial Frame."
Author: Felix Alba Juez

14. "It is worth noting that a wrong folkoric definition of an Inertial Frame in the Popular Science literature (even in text books) reads that 'it is a frame in uniform motion'. We know very well by now that the idea of motion requires a frame of reference, so that such a definition of an Inertial Frame has no meaning whatsoever, confusing the reader because it tacitly reaffirms the idea of absolute motion -- when the goal of every didactic exposition of Relativity Theory should be precisely the opposite."
Author: Felix Alba Juez

15. "I am adrenaline slammed into inertia: a fast car stuck in traffic."
Author: Gayle Forman

16. "We know how ninety-nine percent of the universe works," he told Carter shortly after they met, "and that's the clockworks, that's what we build with. But the other one percent makes the clockworks wind down. That's inertia. No one knows how that works, but it does. It's that one percent mystery that's the way of our maker. Put everything together, energy and inertia, the explicable and the inexplicable, and that's how you and I make our living."
Author: Glen David Gold

17. "Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

18. "Inertia. Guy's law of enchantment: "People at rest will remain at rest, and people in motion will keep moving in the same direction unless an outside enchanter acts upon them."
Author: Guy Kawasaki

19. "The Law of Inertia states that a body in motion will remain in motion, and a body at rest will remain at rest. In life, nothing will happen when no one will make a move"
Author: HaveYouSeenThisGirL

20. "Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn."
Author: Henri Bergson

21. "... people who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work - which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia."
Author: Henry Miller

22. "Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles longCoiled, one thousand miles deepEyes like candy, it has eyes like candyHard and blue, but soft as kittens feetOut of sight or in the element of lightIt could be a devil, it could be an angelWith spiders inside a vision from hellIts spine is a vertical screamSlow as concrete, blurred as a dreamFueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity,Its soul--a twisted wreckage of despair and painAnd the spiders inside are just praying for rainKilling time killing timeAnd praying for rainOne thousand miles deep"
Author: James O'Barr

23. "The way people are forever rolling their eyes to heaven and saying: "Perhaps it's all for the best," when they are perfectly dead sure it's not, makes me enraged. Humility or resignation or whatever you choose to call it, is simply impotent inertia. I'm for a more militant religion!"
Author: Jean Webster

24. "Paradox is an overrated threat. There is...a quality similar to inertia at work. Once an event has occurred, there is an extremely strong tendency for that event to occur. The larger, more significant, or more energetic the event, the more it tends to remain as it originally happened, despite any interference."I frowned. "There's...a law of conservation of history?"
Author: Jim Butcher

25. "You'll notice that the Intrepid's inertial dampeners don't work as well in crisis situations, Dahl remembered Jenkins telling them. The ship could do hairpin turns and loop-de-loops any other time and you'd never notice. But whenever there's a dramatic event, there goes your footing."
Author: John Scalzi

26. "And yet it was also true that the tumor could not be removed by our doctor, and as a result of that a strange medication had been given him that enabled my brother to become even more of an enigma than he was before, and as a result of that there came to exist not only the machine and the inertia that came with it, but a change of perspective among the townsfolk that was a result of their interactions with the various phases of my brother. And so it was that when the flood began to rear its terrible head, not only was there the inertia that we all had to deal with, but a sense of the sublime that we had begun to feel for the waters which had roared upon the horizon."
Author: Justin Dobbs

27. "INERTIA: Unless an object is acted on by friction from an outside force, it will spiral through space, in the same direction at the same speed - indefinitely!"
Author: Karen Russell

28. "So it would be, were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a force in men and nations as in inanimate bodies. In men it takes the form of the psychological principle, so truly expressed in the words of the Gospel, " They have loved darkness better than light, because their deeds were evil." This principle shows itself in men not trying to recognise the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

29. "Sin and the effects of sin are similar to the laws of inertia: a person (or object) in motion will continue on that trajectory until acted upon by an outside force."
Author: Lindsey A. Holcomb

30. "As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor"
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

31. "The depression and inertia I've felt lately is probably the result of such an assault. I have allowed the enemy to rob me of my greatest weapon--joy. And "the joy of the Lord is your strength" (Nehemiah 8:10)."
Author: Lynn Austin

32. "The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead."
Author: Lynne Sharon Schwartz

33. "Cotrim, who was present, said: "Those came who had a genuine interest in you and in us. The eighty would have come only as a formality, would have talked about the inertia of the government, about patent medicines, about the price of real estate, or about each other…" Damasceno listened in silence, shook his head again, and sighed: "But they should have at least come."
Author: Machado De Assis

34. "We know - intellectually - that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive."
Author: Margaret Heffernan

35. "Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said."
Author: Marge Piercy

36. "Any activity where you let go of fears and doubts and inertia, and move toward a goal you desire brings, if not the goal itself (which may or may not be available to you) but brings you a life full of adventure, dedication, excitement and fulfillment – in other words – satisfaction and happiness."
Author: Martin Gover

37. "We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits."
Author: Maurice Strong

38. "In North America, the greatest threat to the Jewish people is not the external force of antisemitism, but the internal forces of apathy, inertia and ignorance of our own heritage."
Author: Michael Steinhardt

39. "Often what keeps us stuck and continually doing penance is the very feeling that we must pay for lack of action. We become caught in a circle of blame, condemn ourselves, feel hopeless, and feed the fire—or slow burn—by reciting like a mantra our history of inertia and self-judged wrong choices. Well, let's break that dead-end cycle of waste and regret."
Author: Noelle Sterne

40. "The fate which oppresses us is the inertia of our spirit. Through extending and cultivating our activity we shall transform ourselves into fate.Everything seems to stream inward into us, because we do not stream outward. We are negative because we want to be—the more positive we become, the more negative will the world around us become—until at last there will be no more negation—but instead we are all in all.God wants there to be gods."
Author: Novalis

41. "Whether out of inertia or selfishness, whether out of fear or a simple lack of moral imagination, we so often spend our lives as if in a fog, accepting injustice, rationalizing inequity, tolerating the intolerable"
Author: Obama

42. "For a patrimonial state to be stable over time, it is best ruled with consent, at least with consent from the largest minority, if not from the majority. Instinctive obedience must be the norm, otherwise too much effort needs to be put into suppressing disaffection for the regime's wider aims to be achievable. Consent is, however, not always easy to obtain. The collective view of most societies is rather conservative: in the main people prefer to see the social arrangements of their youth perpetuated into their old age; they prefer that things be done in the time-honoured way; they are suspicious of novelty and resistant to change. Thus when radical action must be taken, for whatever reason, a great burden falls on the ruler, the father-figure, who has to overcome this social inertia and persuade his subjects to follow his lead. In order that his will shall prevail, he needs to generate huge respect, preferably adulation, and if at all possible sheer awe among his people."
Author: Paul Kriwaczek

43. "By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question."
Author: Robert Harris

44. "Leaders must wake people out of inertia. They must get people excited about something they've never seen before, something that does not yet exist."
Author: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

45. "The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there."
Author: Tahir Shah

46. "Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors."
Author: Terence McKenna

47. "Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil."
Author: Theodor W. Adorno

48. "Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given."
Author: Todd Gitlin

49. "The two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia."
Author: William Faulkner

50. "Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia."
Author: William James

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