Sedentary Quotes

All prejudices may be traced back to the intestines. A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Ghost. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

With men it's rush, rush, rush, every minute. I'm glad I'm a sedentary spider."
"What does sedentary mean?" asked Wilbur.
"Means I sit still a good part of the time and don't go wandering all over creation. I know a good thing when I see it, and my web is a good thing. I stay put and wait for what comes. Gives me a chance to think. ~ E.B. White

Wealthy women who wanted to keep fit maintained well-equipped gyms in their homes and hired personal trainers. The rest led completely sedentary lives. ~ Geraldine Brooks

When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can't simulate in a sedentary position. ~ Twyla Tharp

A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. ~ Michel Foucault

True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot. ~ David R. Brower

Cyclical time already dominates the experience of nomadic populations because they find the same conditions repeated at every moment of their journey: Hegel notes that "the wandering of nomads is only formal because it is limited to uniform spaces." The society which, by fixing itself in place locally, gives space a content by arranging individualized places, thus finds itself enclosed inside this localization. The temporal return to similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a series of gestures. The transition from pastoral nomadism to sedentary agriculture is the end of the lazy liberty without content, the beg inning of labor. The agrarian mode of production in general, dominated by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully constituted cyclical time. Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here on earth. Myth is the unitary construction of the thought which guarantees the entire cosmic order surrounding the order which this society has in fact already realized within its frontiers. ~ Guy Debord

Sporting goods sales have suffered because Americans have become too sedentary. ~ Mike May

All those who have insisted (and still do) that overeating and/or sedentary behavior must be the cause of obesity have done so on the basis of this same fundamental error: they will observe correctly that positive caloric balance must be associated with weight gain, but then they will assume without justification that positive caloric balance is the cause of weight gain. This simple misconception has led to a century of misguided obesity research. ~ Gary Taubes

A lot of us lead relatively sedentary lifestyles, so you have to motivate yourself and force yourself to go to the gym and do active things. The folks that have figured it out, found that thing that they love and made it a big part of their lives, it's easy for them to stay in shape. ~ Randy Couture

DNA sequencing of fecal samples from players in an international rugby union team showed considerably greater diversity of gut bacteria than samples from people who are more sedentary. ~ C.G. Weber

Some regulatory phenomenon could drive us to gain weight, which would in turn cause a positive energy balance - and thus overeating and/or sedentary behavior. ~ Gary Taubes

I can't live without activity; I can't be sedentary. ~ Ferran Adria

He considered his disposition as of the sort which must suffer heavily, uniting very strong feelings with quiet,serious, and retiring manners, and a decided taste for reading and sedentary pursuits. ~ Jane Austen

So, if people didn't settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don't know if any of them are right. According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place. ~ Bill Bryson

Despite the depth and certainty of our faith that saturated fat is the nutritional bane of our lives and that obesity is caused by overeating and sedentary behavior, there has always been copious evidence to suggest that those assumptions are incorrect, and that evidence is continuing to mount. ~ Gary Taubes

The Top 4 Causes of Medical Problems: stress,negative mindset,poor diet, sedentary lifestyle. ~ Charles F. Glassman

An easy life, but not a sedentary one. ~ Marty Rubin

Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice. ~ Bernd Heinrich

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. ~ Carl Sagan

If I am sedentary at a time when I have zero excuse for being sedentary, I call this "blerching. ~ Matthew Inman

If you're totally sedentary and eat 2,500 calories a day, don't instantly go to 1,200 calories and hours of aerobics - your weight loss will be sudden and violent, but also fleeting. ~ Martha Beck

It's tempting to suggest that one reason why the obesity-research community has paid little attention to the logical and scientific deficiencies of the overeating/sedentary-behavior hypothesis is that it becomes difficult even to discuss the subject without constantly tripping over the solecisms it engenders. ~ Gary Taubes

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. ~ Virginia Woolf

Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self - the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give this complicated process is fear. [...]

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
(p. 218) ~ Don DeLillo

Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Sedentary people are apt to have sluggish minds. A sluggish mind is apt to be reflected in flabbiness of body and in a dullness of expression that invites no interest and gets none. ~ Rose Kennedy

IMPORTANT Book reading is a solitary and sedentary pursuit, and those who do are cautioned that a book should be used as an integral part of a well-rounded life, including a daily regimen of rigorous physical exercise, rewarding personal relationships, and sensible low-fat diet. A book should not be used a as a substitute or an excuse. ~ Garrison Keillor

Humans are built to move. We evolved under conditions that required daily intense physical activity, and even among individuals with lower physical potential, that hard-earned genotype is still ours today. The modern sedentary lifestyle leads to the inactivation of the genes related to physical performance, attributes that were once critical for survival and which are still critical for the correct, healthy expression of the genotype. The genes are still there, they just aren't doing anything because the body is not stressed enough to cause a physiological adaptation requiring their activation. The sedentary person's heart, lungs, muscles, bones, nerves and brain all operate far below the level at which they evolved to function, and at which they still function best. ~ Mark Rippetoe

Once it has found a suitable rock, it settles down, opens its mouth to begin a life of sedentary feeding, absorbs its brain, and turns on the TV. ~ Terry Pratchett

In my twenties I was in Austin, Texas, finishing up yet another degree. I'd always loved hiking and, sick of the sedentary life of academia, I'd joined the orienteering club at the university. The sport, which originated in Sweden, is a competition in which you use a special map and a compass to navigate through wilderness you've never seen before, stopping at checkpoints to have a control card physically or electronically stamped. The first competitor to hit the "double circle" - the end of the route on the orienteering map - is the winner. I ~ Jeffery Deaver

All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other. ~ Hermann Hesse

Warning: Before beginning an program of physical inactivity, consult your doctor. Sedentary living is abnormal and dangerous to your health. ~ Frank Forencich

The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. ~ Carl Sagan

Methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave Lake, and that the Esquimauxsledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern night the hunter does not give over to follow the seal and walrus on the ice. They are of sick and diseased imaginations who would toll the world's knell so soon. Cannot these sedentary sects do better than prepare the shrouds and write the epitaphs of those other busy living men? The practical faith of all men belies the preacher's consolation. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Those who sit at their work and are therefore called 'chair workers,' such as cobblers and tailors, suffer from their own particular diseases ... [T]hese workers ... suffer from general ill-health and an excessive accumulation of unwholesome humors caused by their sedentary life ... so to some extent counteract the harm done by many days of sedentary life. On the association between chronic inactivity and poor health. Ramazzini urged that workers should at least exercise on holidays ~ Bernardino Ramazzini

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time. ~ Vernor Vinge

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf 's birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature. ~ Jane Goldman

I'm naturally athletic. I've been involved in sports since I could walk. So, for me to be sedentary is just unacceptable. Not only is it great for your physical body, but it gives me more energy during the day if I've worked out. I feel better. I look better. ~ Eva Longoria

One of the greatest predictors of successful aging, they found, is the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle. Put ~ John Medina

If we live a sedentary life, you're going to be depressed and lack confidence. So get out there and get active. ~ Jessie Pavelka

If a brain is exercised properly, anyone can grow intelligence, at any age, and potentially by a lot. Or you can just let your brain idle - and watch it slowly, inexorably, go to seed like a sedentary body. ~ Michael Merzenich

In reality, is being sedentary a choice to run from our calling by not running after it? ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

WARNING:

Before commencing any program of sustained physical inactivity, consult your physician. Sedentary living doubles the likelihood of stroke and coronary artery disease, making it as risky as smoking, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure. If unaccustomed to sitting for extended periods, you may experience weak muscles, low bone density, high cholesterol, hyperglycaemia, a rapid resting heart rate, mental decline, mood disorders, and obesity. Start slowly and increase inactivity gradually. If you experience drowsiness, difficulty in concentration, or craving for stimulation, discontinue inactivity immediately.:-) ~ Martin Clay Fowler

The very nature of a child is to be active. They are learning, thinking seeing and doing beings. They are never sedentary. Children do not just "look and enjoy", they "do" things. -Meredith L. Pierce ~ Meredith Lyn Pierce

Paleoclimatic records show clearly that the past 10,000 years, the Holocene, is a remarkably stable period in which we went from being a few hunters and gatherers to become more sedentary agriculture-based civilizations, which then moved us to the current populated modern era. ~ Johan Rockstrom

Though differing greatly from animals and leading a sedentary life there are plants which are said to live for hundreds of years, forming a reliable source for scientific research. ~ Justin Ascott

In the past few years, genetics have confirmed that the hunter-gatherers were not overwhelmed by the new wave of sedentary farmers, and that the first agricultural revolution spread well in advance of its first users, by contact and trade in ideas. Nice to see science catching up with economics and military history. Any economist could tell you technology spreads beyond its first adopters, even if they stay at home. And any military historian could tell you that, in a contest between people who hunt and kill aurochs and farmers armed with hoes, the smart money is on the hunters. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

We're distracted and we let the door slam on the person behind us, we trip over curbs as we're texting, we're...sedentary, weighed down, collapsed over the laptop. ...We've forgotten how to move through life with grace. ~ Sarah L. Kaufman

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.
There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.
The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'. ~ Bruce Chatwin

The world is run largely by urban, sedentary males. The symbol of power is the chair. ~ Sam Keen

Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. ~ Carl Sagan

The vast majority of buttocks are overused, whereas that of minds are underused. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Dammit that yodel of triumph of yours was the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my life. I wish I'd a had a tape recorder to take it down.'
'Those things aren't made to be heard by the people below,' says Japhy dead serious.
'By God you're right, all those sedentary bums sitting around on pillows hearing the cry of the triumphant mountain smasher, they don't deserve it. But when I looked up and saw you running down that mountain I suddenly understood everything. ~ Jack Kerouac

This explosion of athletic wear and rompers is very ironic when you think about how much more sedentary we've become. As we've become less active and higher-tech, we're wearing more and more workout clothes. ~ Tim Gunn

I encourage people to pick up small habits like taking a walk after meals ... we've become way too sedentary. Just move! ~ Theo Rossi

When I go running through the forest on hot days, if I stop for any reason, in that very moment mosquitoes will attack me. If I keep moving, they do not bother me. This motivates me to continue without resting. Imagine how wonderful it would be if every time we stopped being active in life the Universe would send us a signal that would push us to carry on. Guess what, it does. When the life we lead does not align with our passions, depression bites at us so we will change our ways. If we eat poorly and live sedentary, we are often afflicted with a serious health condition. We do not get sick, or become ill so that we can blame God, curse our genetics, or give up on life. These conditions arise to motivate us so we will correct our errors and clean up our mistakes. The reason why we are confronted with failures on our mission to obtain happiness is not so we can dwell in misery, but rather for us to reshape our desires and go after what we are destined to succeed with. The Universe is working in our favor, not against us. It is okay to rest at times, but if we do not want to get bit by misfortunes, then we must remain active in our pursuit of a better life. ~ Jesse J. Jacoby

I strongly believe that a very good way to start on the Warrior Diet is by following the diet elements first. This alone will probably do the job. Moreover, it may stimulate even sedentary people to begin some kind of physical activity, due to all the extra energy people generally feel when they become warriors. ~ Ori Hofmekler

Your career is stagnating by the minute. You are steadily letting your sedentary computer-programming desk-bound lifestyle turn your body into mush. All of these problems are much bigger and harder to just fix than a bug. They're all complex, hard to measure, and comprised of many different small solutions - some of which will fail to work! ~ Chad Fowler

Health and programming should go together like a horse and carriage. You can't have one without the other. In our sedentary office work, we often forget that an absence of health is as bad as a lack of programming skills. ~ Staffan Noteberg

Studies have shown that people who are physically active sleep better than those who are sedentary. The more energy you expend during the day, the sleepier you will feel at bedtime. ~ Andrew Weil

A story, in which native humour reigns, Is often useful, always entertains; A graver fact, enlisted on your side, May furnish illustration, well applied; But sedentary weavers of long tales Give me the fidgets, and my patience fails. ~ William Cowper

With the publication of Running & Being in 1978, George Sheehan's voice became the voice of a movement, sounding a clarion call to hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their sedentary ways, take to the streets, and run. Today, there are millions of us lacing up our running shoes, training for 5-Ks, 10-Ks, half-marathons, and marathons - each trudging the same path of fitness and self-discovery that he blazed decades before. ~ George Sheehan

Modern life cannot be constructed on ... physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. ~ Bertrand Russell

Like our physical bodies, our memory becomes out of shape. As children, we are constantly learning new experiences, but by the time we reach our 20s, we start to lead a more sedentary life both mentally and physically. Our lives become routine, and we stop challenging our brains, and our memory starts to suffer. ~ Tony Buzan

The science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one - specifically, the stimulation of insulin secretion caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars, like sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup. These carbohydrates literally make us fat, and by driving us to accumulate fat, they make us hungrier and they make us sedentary. ~ Gary Taubes

Human bodies are designed for regular physical activity. The sedentary nature of much of modern life probably plays a significant role in the epidemic incidence of depression today. Many studies show that depressed patients who stick to a regimen of aerobic exercise improve as much as those treated with medication. ~ Andrew Weil

I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate. ~ John Buchan

My house on wheels will have two feet once again and my dreams no frontiers, at least until the bullets have their say. I await you, sedentary gypsy, when the smell of gunpowder dissipates. ~ John Lee Anderson

It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes
for that is a sedentary task
than like one who destroys them ... But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order. ~ Claudio Magris

Radiation does discriminate. If you are sedentary and eating processed foods then you will be more affected than a person that exercises and eats fresh organic food. ~ Steven Magee

This notion of shared experience is important. A hiker, for example, has much more in common with other hikers who have walked paths foreign to him than with sedentary people who have never hiked anywhere but have read books about the hiker's favorite path. If someone has hiked several mountains in Switzerland, for instance, he or she is likely to have more in common with those who have hiked in the Rocky Mountains than with those who have never hiked at all. The terrain may be different, but the act of hiking is similar. The same is true about spirituality. The acts of praying, meditating, fasting, contemplating deeply, and having other direct forms of experience, all influence practitioners differently than mere reading or listening. Moreover, because we all have the same tools to work with - body, mind, and spirit - practitioners from different faiths will have more in common than they realize. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

Did you ever hear of the Queensborough Bridge?'
Wilbur shook his head. 'Is it a web?'
'Sort of,' replied Charlotte. 'But do you know how long it took men to build it? Eight whole years. My goodness, I would have starved to death waiting that long. I can make a web in a single evening.'
'What do people catch in the Queensborough Bridge - bugs?' asked Wilbur.
'No,' said Charlotte. 'They don't catch anything. They just keep trotting back and forth across the bridge thinking there is something better on the other side. If they'd hang head-down at the top of the thing and wait quietly, maybe something good would come along. But no - with men it's rush, rush, rush, every minute. I'm glad I'm a sedentary spider. ~ E.B. White

I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day. ~ Angela Carter

When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it's an odd feeling to switch stories. ~ Donald Miller

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five- or six-mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day. I have done this for many years. It is at these times I seem to get re-charged. If I do not walk one day, I seem to have on the next what van Gogh calls "the meagerness.""The meagerness," he said, "or what is called depression." After a day or two of not walking, when I try to write I feel a little dull and irresolute. For a long time I thought that the dullness was just due to the asphyxiation of an indoor, sedentary life (which all people who do not move around a great deal in the open air suffer from, though they do not know it). ~ Brenda Ueland

Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children's sports in history. ~ Richard Louv

McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," "The Wit of Porportuk." He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London's romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print. ~ Jon Krakauer

If your doctor has warned you to avoid excitement, do not turn to exploring your past lives as a soothing and sedentary occupation ... ~ Herbie Brennan

All sedentary workers ... suffer from the itch, are a bad colour, and in poor condition ... for when the body is not kept moving the blood becomes tainted, its waste matter lodges in the skin, and the condition of the whole body deteriorates. ~ Bernardino Ramazzini

The contemporary sedentary is someone who feels at home everywhere, thanks to cellphones, and the nomad is someone who does not feel at home anywhere, someone who is excluded, ostracized. ~ Paul Virilio

The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue - and peace of mind. ~ Henry Williamson

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption. ~ Ibn Khaldun

Heade's calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God's grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by the small sedentary or plodding foreground figures that appear uncannily at peace as the clouds blacken and the lightning flashes. ~ John Updike

But if sedentary behavior makes us fat and physical activity prevents it, shouldn't the "exercise explosion" and the "new fitness revolution" have launched and epidemic of leanness rather than coinciding with an epidemic of obesity? ~ Gary Taubes