Top 100 Inert Quotes
#1. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.
Carl Becker
#2. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.
Albert Camus
#3. We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers.
Rabindranath Tagore
#4. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.
Leonora Carrington
#6. Never sit under a tree waiting for the apple to fall. Climb the tree, grab that apple!
When it comes, never be inert and take your time, TIME TO MOVE!
Tsem Tulku Rinpoche
#7. Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas'
- that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind
without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Alfred North Whitehead
#8. My soul is not satisfied with an inert universe. The gods may not make a habit of speaking to me personally, but I can't help but whisper comments to them.
Thomm Quackenbush
#9. If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics ... but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.
Philip Pullman
#10. How do you make the timelessness of inert, silent objects count for something? How to use the, in a way, dumbness of sculpture in a way that acts on us as living things?
Antony Gormley
#11. To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.
Rupert Sheldrake
#12. 95% of the people who walk the earth are inert, Johnny. 1% are saints, and 1% are assholes. The other 3% do what they say they can do.
Stephen King
#13. I think there's nothing worse than inertia. You can be inert and study your navel, and gradually fall off the chair. I think the key is to keep flying.
Ridley Scott
#14. Industrial capitalism brought representative democracy, but with a weak public mandate and inert citizenry. The digital age offers a new democracy based on public deliberation and active citizenship.
Don Tapscott
#15. I am afraid I shall have to give up my trade; I am far too inert to keep up with organic chemistry, it is becoming too much for me, though I may boast of having contributed something to its development. The modern system of formulae is to me quite repulsive.
Friedrich Wohler
#16. Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
Geoffrey Hill
#17. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
Jean Baudrillard
#18. Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
Stanley Fish
#19. This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion.
Edouard Leve
#20. My life had indeed become meaningless to me. Even lack of sleep was not a concern for me; only hunger remained a sensation worthy of articulation. Once that hunger was assuaged, I would return to my inert state.
Ashokamitran
#21. In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like anything enormous and inert, it's fundamentally stable, and, like anything emotion-driven, it's volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.
Mickey Rourke
#22. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. But as I peeked at my brother's inert body ... I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#24. Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time ... its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.
Shirley Chisholm
#26. Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools.
Iris Murdoch
#27. Common sense steps in here and says: Separate the parts you want to be mobile from the parts you want to be inert. You have seen the result, and I know many have the skill to apply it.
Lawrence Hargrave
#28. I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN's Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command.
Stan Goff
#29. No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I'm convinced.
Joshua Cohen
#30. Instead of being an inert object, nothingness would appear to be a dynamic thing, a sort of annihilating force.
Jim Holt
#31. The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#32. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
Alfred North Whitehead
#33. It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic;
Erwin Schrodinger
#34. Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within. Everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside.
Nikola Tesla
#35. A very receptive state of mind ... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.
Minor White
#36. Always discriminate-your body, your house, the people and the world are all absolutely unreal like a dream. Always think that the body is only an inert instrument. And the Atman within is your real nature.
Swami Vivekananda
#37. The business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material
Sri Aurobindo
#38. The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live.
Robertson Davies
#39. Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?
Marisa Silver
#40. ... some of us had built whole careers - pointing out how unfair and whimsical and chaotic the entertainment business was, how it rarely rewarded the truly talented. None of us could see how it never rewarded the inert
Patton Oswalt
#41. Be a busy person. People who are active are often much more at peace with themselves than those who are inactive and inert.
Wayne Dyer
#42. Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.
Carl Sagan
#43. He resembled a corpse. This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion. You
Edouard Leve
#44. And what can still delight an inert stone except to become, once more, the bed of a raging torrent?
Julien Gracq
#45. Beyond his recyclable chemicals, what possible utility could The Owner of All Infernal Names find in a soldier whose body (or what remains of it) lays inert at room temperature?
John Zande
#46. No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait.
Albert Camus
#47. Now the images and temples constructed by mechanics are made of inert matter, so that they too are inert, material, and profane. Even if you perfect the art, it partakes of mechanical coarseness. Works of art cannot then be sacred and divine.
Clement Of Alexandria
#48. Unless you've touched a corpse before, you can't comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother's face.
Elan Mastai
#49. Our actions are part of who we are. It's not that we are inert things who do stuff. Rather, the stuff we do and who we are are inextricably woven together.
Brad Warner
#50. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#51. Thought is a melody, Audrey thinks, while the body is an inert mechanism of cogs, springs, chains and ratchets ...
Will Self
#52. At bottom he did not believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a ten percent raise in wages. The public mind was a thing too big, too complicated and inert for a vision or an ideal to get at and move deeply.
Sherwood Anderson
#53. So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you.
Franz Kafka
#54. The transformation at the corporate level was achieved by selling off business units in old markets and by creating new business units to pursue the new opportunities. But the individual business units themselves within those transformed corporations were almost inert to change.
Clayton Christensen
#55. Imagination, thought, may be admirable mechanisms but they can also be inert. Suffering alone sets them going.
Marcel Proust
#56. The secret to changing your life is in your intentions. Wishing, hoping and goal setting cannot accomplish change without intention. What is needed is a shift from the inert energy of wanting to the active energy of doing and intention.
Wayne Dyer
#57. After the shot he collapsed on the bed and lay there inert, but something was stirring in his spine from neck to the tail - and now pieces tore loose in the eggs and then a red, glistening head emerges in reeking yellow slime - and then the whole centipede crawling out quick.
William S. Burroughs
#58. Nietzsche's point is that the world does not present itself as an indifferent array of inert facts. The world tempts and repulses, threatens and charms; certain features impress themselves upon us, others recede into the perphery, unnoticed. Our experience of the world is fundamentally value-laden.
Paul Katsafanas
#59. The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.
George Steiner
#60. Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.
George Orwell
#61. The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.
Eric Hoffer
#62. Warlock: Four thousand and fifty-three metric tons of inert rock, metal and organic matter, frozen solid.
Quasar: Frozen in what?
Drax: Time.
Quasar: "Time", Drax?
Drax: Uh-huh. Old, old frozen time.
Quasar: Right. And that tastes like what?
Drax: Regret.
Dan Abnett
#63. Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.
Clifton Fadiman
#64. For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.
Chris Raschka
#65. Things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within.
Marcus Aurelius
#66. I find greater companionship in inert figures, animals & speechless artifacts, for I can enjoy their presence & there is no psychic drain
Anton Szandor LaVey
#67. It is necessary to correct the error that vegetarianism has made us weak in mind, or passive or inert in action. I do not regard flesh-food as necessary at any stage
Mahatma Gandhi
#69. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.
Neil Postman
#70. So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches forward towards any small chink of light that I thought I saw ... As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became accustomed to the dark
Quentin Crisp
#71. How close beneath the surface, even in the happiest family, is the chronic grievance! I sometimes think that tinderboxes are inert and powder kegs mere talcum compared to the explosive possibilities in the most commoplace domestic situation.
Margaret Halsey
#72. Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.
Constance Hale
#73. An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.
Daniel Dennett
#74. Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
Siri Hustvedt
#75. It was too small a step,
somehow, too puny a thing to settle for after having lost so
much. So the courtship continued, and the more Tom came to
despise his job, the more stubbornly he defended his own inertia;
and the more inert he became, the more he despised himself.
Paul Auster
#76. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
Arthur Koestler
#77. A tree is a vast thing full of heavy mass. But that mass is mostly inert. The real life of the tree happens in three very thin layers - the phloem, xylem, and cambium. These thin layers are just beneath the bark and they are the envelope of life around the heartwood at the center of the tree.
Ned Hayes
#78. Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.
Shoshana Zuboff
#79. It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.
Neil Jordan
#80. Very few things in the living universe are truely inert. So those with the eyes to see it, can precieve a very different realm from mundane world of man.
Evan Currie
#81. I shall be neutral and inert. No difficulty there. Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes. But I am less given to them now, since coming here.
Samuel Beckett
#82. After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens
#83. Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint ... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living.
Philip Guston
#84. If we speak of things as inert or inanimate objects, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us - we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us.
David Abram
#85. Of all social institutions language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#86. Saving these animals was what she did, it was an anathema to try to understand someone who'd take their lives - for something as inert and valueless as money. She
Toni Anderson
#87. Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#88. Young men and women are causing wealth loss to their generation because they are sitting on inert ideas, bottled-up potential energy and scratching the ground when they should be gliding the skies and perambulating with the stars. These people are so disillusioned they live life without any urgency.
Nana Awere Damoah
#89. In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.
Gaston Bachelard
#90. My books are inert as cordwood till a reader's imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.
David James Duncan
#91. One of my earliest joys as a parent lay in knowing that at the end of the day I had once again ushered three babies back to their beds, against the odds, unscathed and peaceful. Happiness was a houseful of safe, inert bodies. Actually, it still is.
Phyllis Grissim-Theroux
#92. Dance and I are synonymous, and nobody can take away dance from my life. Also, I cannot look at dance in an inert way; it's my passion, and I get keen on being part of any show or film that has dance!
Malaika Arora Khan
#94. The typical entrepreneur is no longer the bold and tireless man of Marshall, or the sly and rapacious Moneybags of Marx, but a mass of inert shareholders, indistinguishable from rentiers, who employ salaried managers to run their concerns.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
#95. She glanced down at the ground and the inert form of her brother. "What happened to Travis?"
Mitch winced. "I hit him with the door after I tore it off. It was a total accident."
"Marry me," she spouted before she could stop herself.
Shelly Laurenston
#96. man as he really is, inert, sluggish, and averse from labour, unless compelled by necessity
Thomas Robert Malthus
#97. Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.
Amy Waldman
#98. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly "inert" letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless - as mysterious as a talking stone.
David Abram
#99. My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it.
Thomm Quackenbush
#100. Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.
Jane Jacobs
