Inertia Quotes

The laws of physics that deal with inertia also apply to humans, such that situations tend to remain the same over time. ~ Del Suggs

I had a sister named Inertia,"said Metusine. "Died. Ill from the day she was born. Mother thought if she named her that it would keep her alive. Keep her in motion. ~ Rivers Solomon

If history is a guide, a victory for Obama means he faces the prospect of a second term dogged by scandal or inertia. ~ Ron Fournier

Inertia is the first law of history, as it is of physics. ~ Morris Raphael Cohen

It is so hard to leave - until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world. ~ John Green

The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up. ~ Pam Houston

Under a socialist mode of production all personal incentives which selfishness provides under capitalism are removed, and a premium is put upon laziness and negligence. Whereas in a capitalist society selfishness incites everyone to the utmost diligence, in a socialist society it makes for inertia and laxity. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversary


Somewhere up in the eaves it began:
high in the roof – in a sort of vault
between the slates and the gutter – a small leak.
Through it, rain which came from the east,
in from the lights and foghorns of the coast –
water with a ghost of ocean salt in it –
spilled down on the path below.
Over and over and over
years stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought, of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.
It happened under our lives: the rain,
the stone. We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder:
all those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures. ~ Eavan Boland

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 ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Democracy is threatened by the inertia of good people, by the selfishness of most people, and by the evil designs of a few people. ~ Stanley King

When describing me, Tracy often refers to a well-known concept of physics: 'inertia.' As Newton avers in his first law: 'An object that is not moving will not move until a force acts upon it. An object that is moving will not change its velocity until a net force acts upon it.' In other words, depending on what's happening in my life at any given moment, I can either be the laziest human being on the planet, or the busiest. I'm perfectly content to do absolutely nothing until I'm catalyzed by some person or project, and then I go nonstop until some countervailing force acts upon me, and I revert back to static mode. ~ Michael J. Fox

Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to stay in the groove. When you get out of the groove, you start to dread the work, because you know it's going to suck for a while - it's going to suck until you get back into the flow. ~ Austin Kleon

Absolutism, in both religious and political idealism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations. In religion, it permits absurdities and in politics cruelties, which fail to achieve justifying consequences because the inertia of human nature remains a nemesis to the absolute ideal...The fanaticism which in the individual may appear in the guise of a harmless or pathetic vagary, when expressed in political policy, shuts the gates of mercy on mankind. ~ Gustav Niebuhr

Inertia, force, mass, gravity, velocity, acceleration. . .cause and effect.

Liz Emerson doesn't understand any of it.

But I do.

I understand how we fall. Where we fall. Why we fall.

I understand her sadness and loneliness and silence, her shattered heart.

It doesn't have to be this way, does it?

It wasn't always this way, was it?

Stay alive, Liz Emerson, stay alive. ~ Amy Zhang

Small societies are particularly vulnerable to disruption of key lifelines, such as trading relations, or to large perturbations like wars or natural disasters. Larger societies, with more diverse and extensive resources, can rush aid to disaster victims. But the complexity that brings resilience may also impede adaptation and change, producing social inertia that maintains collectively destructive behavior. Consequently, large societies have difficulty adapting to slow change and remain vulnerable to problems that eat away their foundation, such as soil erosion. In contrast, small systems are adaptable to shifting baselines but are acutely vulnerable to large perturbations. But unlike the first farmer-hunter-gatherers who could move around when their soil was used up, a global civilization cannot. ~ David R. Montgomery

By the early-afternoon hours, if your brain is normal, it's running strictly on inertia and reflex. All you can do during those hours are the things that are exactly like other things you've done in similar situations. Creativity is out of the question. You might argue that you don't notice any difference in your thinking during the afternoon. That's because you're too dazed to notice anything during those hours. I'm sure it's true for me; I believe you could set my eyebrows on fire during the afternoon and I wouldn't notice until sometime the next morning. ~ Scott Adams

Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

One of the greatest glories of growing older is the willingness to ask why and, getting no good answer, deciding to follow my own inclinations and desires. Asking why is the way to wisdom. Why are we supposed to want possessions we don't need and work that seems beside the point and tight shoes and a fake tan? Why are we supposed to think new is better than old, youth and vigor better than long life and experience? Why are we supposed to turn our backs on those who have preceded us and to snipe at those who come after? When we were small children we asked 'Why?' constantly. Asking the question now is more a matter of testing the limits of what sometimes seems a narrow world. One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating conformity. ~ Anna Quindlen

You can't work at a relationship; you can't control it. You have to be lucky and go through your life. If you are not lucky you have to be prepared for some degree of suffering. That's why most relationships are very difficult and have some degree of pain. People stay together because of inertia, they don't have the energy. Because they are frightened of being lonely, or they have children. ~ Woody Allen

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. ~ Daley Thompson

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The great enemy of any attempt to change men's habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by intertia. ~ Edward L. Bernays

If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life.
To do so is fairly easy in principle, but more difficult in practice. Yet it is sure worth trying. The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. The next step is to transfer some psychic energy each day from tasks that we don't like doing, or from passive leisure, into something we never did before, or something we enjoy doing but don't do often enough because it seems too much trouble. There are literally millions of potentially interesting things in the world to see, to do, to learn about. But they don't become actually interesting until we devote attention to them. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits. ~ Nadia Boulanger

Change has to be hard because you're fighting against inertia. ~ James Thornton

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions. ~ Walt Whitman

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. ~ George Santayana

Your patterns of thought, existing bodies of knowledge, beliefs, predispositions, etc. are the 'stuff of your mental universe'. We are always subject to the power of our mental inertia. The waves in our mental oceans can never be magically stilled, and are therefore always impacting our new beliefs, even when we become scrutinizing adults. It is simply impossible to 'wipe the slate clean' and start over. These effects remain with us throughout our entire lives. Even the beliefs that we later discard are difficult to completely negate, and leave their own residual effects. ~ Daniel Ionson

Inertia is often mistaken for patience. ~ Marty Rubin

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? ~ Jim Butcher

There are two kinds of discontented in this world, the discontented that works and the discontented that wrings its hands. The first gets what it wants and the second loses what it has. There is no cure for the first but success and there is no cure at all for the second. The very worst of my vices and bad habits will abate of themselves if they are brought to an accounting every day. ~ Og Mandino

I know, that since life is our most precious gift, and as far as we can be absolutely certain, it's given to us to live but once, let us so live we will not regret years of useless virtue, and inertia, and timidity, and ignorance, and in our last moments we can say: 'All my life, all my conscious energies, have been dedicated to the most noble cause in the world, the liberation of the human mind and spirit - beginning with my own'. ~ Maya Angelou

So many fail because they don't get started - they don't go. They don't overcome inertia. They don't begin. ~ Ben Stein

Americans, more than most people, believe that history is the result of individual decisions to implement conscious intentions. For Americans, more than most people, history has been that ... This sense of openness, of possibility and autonomy, has been a national asset as precious as the topsoil of the Middle West. But like topsoil, it is subject to erosion; it requires tending. And it is not bad for Americans to come to terms with the fact that for them too, history is a story of inertia and the unforeseen. ~ George Will

While self-interest arising from the enjoyment of meat eating is obviously one reason for its entrenchment, and inertia another, a process of language usage engulfs discussions about meat by constructing the discourse in such a way that these issues need never be addressed. Language distances us from the reality of meat eating, thus reinforcing the symbolic meaning of meat eating, a symbolic meaning that is intrinsically patriarchal and male-oriented. Meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there
patriarchal control of animals and of language. ~ Carol J. Adams

Tits and cunts and legs and lips and mouths and tongues and assholes! How can I give up what I have never even had, for a girl, who delicious and provocative as once she may have been, will inevitably grow as familiar to me as a loaf of bread? For Love? What love? Is that what binds all these couples we know together - the ones who even bother to let themselves be bound? Isn't it something more like weakness? Isn't it rather convenience and apathy and guilt? Isn't it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that "love" that the marriage counsellors and songwriters and psychotherapists are forever dreaming about? ~ Philip Roth

All nature works, and then rests; works and rests. I caught its rhythm and worked and rested with it. When I felt that inertia stealing over me, I rested; and while resting my power recuperated - the tide rose in me. ~ Elizabeth Towne

Just try to let yourself be carried away blindly by your feelings, without reflection, without a primary cause, suppressing consciousness even for a moment; hate or love, anything, just in order not to sit idly by with your arms folded. The day after tomorrow at the very latest, you'll begin to despise yourself for having deceived yourself knowingly. The result: a soap bubble and inertia. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I have referred to this already. I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work - no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

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! ~ Karen Russell

Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles long
Coiled, one thousand miles deep
Eyes like candy, it has eyes like candy
Hard and blue, but soft as kittens feet
Out of sight or in the element of light
It could be a devil, it could be an angel
With spiders inside a vision from hell
Its spine is a vertical scream
Slow as concrete, blurred as a dream
Fueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity,
Its soul
a twisted wreckage of despair and pain
And the spiders inside are just praying for rain
Killing time killing time
And praying for rain
One thousand miles deep ~ James O'Barr

Investors are people with more money than time.
Employees are people with more time than money.
Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.
Startups are business experiments performed with other people's money.
Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it."
"Company culture is what goes without saying.
There are no real rules, only laws.
Success forgives all sins.
People who leak to you, leak about you.
Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.
Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society.
Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.
Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities.
Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player - investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer - is complicit. ~ Antonio García Martínez

Just do right. Right may not be expedient, it may not be profitable, but it will satisfy your soul. It brings you the kind of protection that bodyguards can't give you. So try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity.
Take up the battle. Take it up.
It's yours. This is your life.
This is your world. ~ Maya Angelou

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. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be replaced,
one must find a major field of action for human inertia,
the worker must have something to keep him busy,
new fields of activity must be created,
in which we shall see at last the reign
of all the fake manufactured products,
of all the vile synthetic substitutes
in which beautiful real nature has no part,
and must give way finally and shamefully
before all the victorious
substitute products
in which the sperm
of all the artificial insemination factories
will make a miracle
in order to produce armies and battleships.

No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables, no more plants pharmaceutical or otherwise
and consequently no more food,
but synthetic products to satiety,
amid the fumes,
amid the special humors of the atmosphere,
on the particular axes of atmospheres wrenched violently and synthetically from the resistances of a nature which has known nothing of war except fear.

And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for
and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition
that could not fail to arise on all sides,
one must have soldiers, armies, airplanes, battleships,
hence this sperm
w ~ Antonin Artaud

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. ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action. ~ Herbert Schiller

I guess I realize that I don't want to die. I don't want to live either, but-there really isn't anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it's easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it's going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

The world is dead, The Samurai, moving among the inert metal of pumps and lines and distillation columns, over the concrete apron in which the plants were constructed, over gravel brought from the Prospect quarries. it is a world of age-old stones - picking up a piece of gravel in which glinted minerals unknown to him - of basalt chiped from mountains long ago, lying around on roads, lying under hills waiting to be plundered. And laughing at humans. These dead rocks were all of them older than the human race which trod them. each fragment had an immortality. Humans rotted away into the soil in an instant of time.

What was the power he had that enabled him to lift this fragment of eternity in his hand and decide where to throw it? What had been breathed into his fragile dust that seemed for his instant of life to mock the inertia of the rock? Was his own existence supported by a paper warrant somewhere?

He drew back from following these thoughts. There was a power in him, or rather power came to him that made him stronger than he needed to be. A power that blew up certain feelings to an enormous size, a secret power. Was he so different from the men around him? What was the mission that he had been born to perform?
He deliberately relaxed. As he looked about him with a new mood the whole world filled with love. Even the dirt underfoot was sympathetic and grateful. he could love these random stones, these heaps of inert, formed metal so far now fro ~ David Ireland

But when we face the great questions about gravitation Does it require time? Is it polar to the 'outside of the universe' or to anything? Has it any reference to electricity? or does it stand on the very foundation of matter-mass or inertia? then we feel the need of tests, whether they be comets or nebulae or laboratory experiments or bold questions as to the truth of received opinions. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium. ~ Thomas Huxley

Whatever I think or feel inevitably turns into a form of inertia. Thought, which for other people is a compass to guide action, is for me its microscope, making me see whole universes to span where a footstep would have sufficed, as if Zeno's argument about the impossibility of crossing a given space - which, being infinitely divisible, is therefore infinite - were a strange drug that had intoxicated my psychological self. And feeling, which in other people enters the will like a hand in a glove, or like a fist in the guard of a sword, was always in me another form of thought - futile like a rage that makes us tremble so much we can't move, or like a panic (the panic, in my case, of feeling too intensely) that freezes the frightened man in his tracks, when his fright should make him flee. ~ Fernando Pessoa

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. ~ Walter Benjamin

Technology has made it easier for different firms to coordinate their activities with one another, and they don't have to be part of one company. They can get the benefits of scale without the inertia of scale. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson

People often say that women forget what childbirth is like, because if they remembered, no one would ever do it more than once. Personally, I had no trouble at all remembering. The sense of massive inertia, particularly. That endless time toward the end, when it seems that it never will end, that one is mired in some prehistoric tar pit, every small move a struggle doomed to futility. Every square centimeter of skin stretched as thin as one's temper. You don't forget. You simply get to the point where you don't care what birth will feel like; anything is better than being pregnant for an instant longer. ~ Diana Gabaldon

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. ~ Maurice Strong

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity. ~ Anna Quindlen

Men are naturally lazy, and require some great stimulus to goad their flagging ambitions and enable them to overcome the inertia which comes from ease and the consciousness of inherited wealth. Whatever lessens in a young man the feeling that he must make his way in the world cripples his chance of success. Poverty has ever been the priceless spur that has goaded man up to his own loaf. ~ Orison Swett Marden

Really he was not an interesting man: short, broad, stout, red-faced, with an immense amount of mental inertia, discharging itself in constant lingual activity about little nothings. ~ George MacDonald

Courageous leaders face unpleasant and even devastating situations with equanimity, then act firmly to bring good from trouble, even if their action is unpopular. Leadership always faces natural human inertia and opposition. But courage follows through with a task until it is done. ~ J. Oswald Sanders

If there were no beginnings and if there were no endings, we would have the absence of inertia and the presence of stagnation. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

MASS INCREASES

The final paradox of relativity is the increase in mass due to motion. Mass increase has been observed experimentally in particle accelerators, with increases as great as 3000% for particles traveling at over 99.9% the speed of light. How can the mass of an object get bigger just because it's moving?

Intuitive explanation. As we saw in Chapter 2, mass means inertia - i.e., resistance to acceleration. If you push something and it doesn't respond much, then by definition it has a large mass or inertia. Now we just saw that pushing on something that is traveling at close to the speed of light has little effect on its speed because the underlying fields are already moving almost as fast as they can. Thus its resistance to acceleration has become greater and this means its mass has increased. Mass increase is just another way of saying that fields can't propagate faster than c. ~ Rodney A. Brooks

It's like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness. ~ Fernando Pessoa

CEOs of large firms often fail to read the handwriting on the wall, because of complacence, inertia, or overconfidence. ~ Navi Radjou

Every thing was to take its natural course, however, neither impelled nor assisted. ~ Jane Austen

The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became - though even to use words like "corrupt" and "sinister" made serious people uncomfortable, and so Brad avoided them. ~ Michael Lewis

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. ~ Michael Steinhardt

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language ... Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world
qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. ~ Italo Calvino

At my age, every day that I overcome simple inertia is a victory. ~ Michael LaRocca

Inertia, when first encountered, appears to be an immovable force. We are creatures who like comfort, patterns, and repetition ... Yet change is life's only constant. ~ Laurie Beth Jones

And so a miserable but possible scenario is that countries in the bottom billion oscillate between the traps and limbo, perhaps switching in the process from one trap to another..
Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change, but usually they are defeated by the powerful internal forces stacked against them. We should be helping the heroes. So far, our efforts have been paltry: through inertia, ignorance, and incompetence, we have stood by and watched them lose.
Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. These societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. ~ Paul Collier

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

I am, and that is all I know at times,
My being shaped by forces known and not.
But whereas words are made to bend to rhymes,
My feet are bound to steps that I have wrought.

I feel myself expanding into this
Beautiful niche I could not see before
But I always sensed-and now I cannot miss
Myself: I am unlimited and more

Is opening to me, the more I open
To this sweet fear, like falling from a cloud,
My heart's inertia clear and calm, unspoken
But heard. It says to me: "You are allowed."

And I am free at last to feel this way
To take this step: to wonder, love and stray. ~ David Griswold

When you regularly take continuous action toward your most important goals, you activate the Momentum Principle of success. This principle says that although it may take tremendous amounts of energy to overcome inertia and get started initially, it then takes far less energy to keep going. ~ Brian Tracy

A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth's continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: "They have a propensity for laziness." To others, it seems that he should have said: "They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions." In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

More often than not, I feel hopeless. I give up. I cannot overcome myself, my body, these hundreds of pounds shrouding my body. It is easier, I think, to be miserable, to remain mired in self-loathing. I don't hate myself the way society expects me to until I have a bad day and then I do hate myself. I disgust myself. I cannot stand my weakness, my inertia, my inability to overcome my past, to overcome my body.

This hopelessness is paralyzing. Working out and eating well and trying to take good care of myself start to feel futile. I look at my body, and I live in my body, and I think, I will never know anything but this. I will never know anything better than this.

And then I think, If I am really this miserable, if my life really is this hard, why do I still do nothing?

All too often, I look at myself in the mirror and all I can do is ask myself, Why? and What is it going to take for you to find the strength to change? ~ Roxane Gay

Instagram, Swiffer, and Nest had to compete with consumer habits and perceptions. Breakout products face competition from the formidable inertia powering the status quo. ~ Jay Samit

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed. ~ Alice Walker

There seems to be a psychological law of inertia that bogs down every hopeful activist and subverts every revolution. When compassion and empathy fail, backsliding begins. Or totalitarianism. ~ Patrick Califia-Rice

The way upward from inertia to illumination passes through the sphere of action. ~ Swami Prabhavananda

Whatever blocks you encounter, you have learned that there is a way over, around or through them. It is not those obstacles that inhibit your progress but your confidence, and will to break the inertia of fear and doubt. ~ Douglas Smith

she runs for her life because to slip up is to begin descending the slippery slope to giving in to failure, to inertia, to feeling sorry for herself about that moment in her life which still creeps to the front of her memory when she least expects it ~ Bernardine Evaristo

The noontide of my life is starting,
Which I must needs accept, I know;
But oh, my light youth, if we're parting,
I want you as a friend to go!
My thanks to you for the enjoyments,
The sadness and the pleasant torments,
The hubbub, storms, festivity,
For all that you have given me;
My thanks to you. I have delighted
In you when times were turbulent,
When times were calm... to full extent;
Enough now! With a soul clear-sighted
I set out on another quest
And from my old life take a rest.

Let me glance back. Farewell, you arbours
Where, in the backwoods, I recall
Days filled with indolence and ardours
And dreaming of a pensive soul.
And you, my youthful inspiration,
Keep stirring my imagination,
My heart's inertia vivify,
More often to my corner fly.
Let not a poet's soul be frozen,
Made rough and hard, reduced to bone
And finally be turned to stone
In that benumbing world he goes in,
In that intoxicating slough
Where, friends, we bathe together now. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Take one Naive Girl. Bring to room temperature in the Big City. Add three cups Academia. If in one cup Encouragement. Fold in two drop Love. Sprinkle with one teaspoon Adoration. Mix thoroughly. Spoon carefully into greased Pan of Matrimony. Bake in Desert Heat for 25. Test doneness with Careless Toothpick. Let cool on Wire Rack of Inertia. Serve with generous dollops of Benign Neglect. ~ Elizabeth J. Church

Authentic Christianity has a horror of the pessimism of inertia. It is pessimist, profoundly pessimist in the sense that it knows that the creature comes from nothingness, and that all that issues from nothing essentially tends of itself to return to nothing: but it's optimism is incomparably deeper than it's pessimism; for it knows that the creature comes from God, and all that comes from God tends to return to Him. ~ Jacques Maritain

Inertia accounts for two-thirds of marriages. But love accounts for the other third. ~ Woody Allen

Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity. ~ Maya Angelou

What I think we fear is rapid, pronounced, and uncontrollable changes to ourselves, and because of this we have a form of personality inertia - something that resists rapid change. ~ Simon Travaglia

when there is an increase in the mode of ignorance.
O son of Kuru, darkness,inertia, madness are manifested. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

For it is not inertia alone
that is responsible for human relationships repeating
themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and
unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes
nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation
to another as something alive. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Any content that functions through its emotional dynamisms, such as the paralyzing grip of inertia or an invasion by instinct, belongs to the sphere of the mother, to nature. But all contents capable of conscious realization, a value, an idea, a moral canon, or some other spiritual force, are related to the father-, never to the mother-system. ~ Erich Neumann

It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition. ~ Northrop Frye

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness. ~ Amanda Craig

The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia. ~ Elbert Hubbard

Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis - you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever" - which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value. ~ David Foster Wallace

Stupidity, once it overcomes its initial state of inertia, is sustained by its own momentum. ~ Nana Awere Damoah

The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal. ~ William Winwood Reade

Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy. ~ Max McKeown

The United States inherited a seemingly inexhaustible fortune in natural resources, yet it has responded to its environment with a dismaying mixture of materialism and inertia. The nation was virtually founded upon a ubiquitous desire for access to land and its contents. Its amazing growth during the nineteenth century was based directly upon the exploitation - immediate, unplanned, full use of soils, minerals, forests, and rivers. Equitable access to these natural bounties rather than constitutional guarantees would be the practical basis for democracy. Subsequently, political institutions were shaped in such a way that they could facilitate the disposition of the public domain. But that expectation, as later generations ruefully observed, did not materialize. The combination of economics and government had instead produced a handful of owners and policy makers who were beyond the control of the ballot box. ~ Elmo Richardson