90 Inert Quotes

Following is our list of inert quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about fearing the unknown.

Quick Jump To

Famous Inert Quotes

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. — Joan D. Vinge

The sage acts by doing nothing. — Lao Tzu

At times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning. — Jenny Holzer

Inaction, letting be, neither creating nor destroying--that is my evil. And also the knower as one without desire. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Indifference creates an artificial peace. — Mason Cooley

No thought, no action, no movement, total stillness: only thus can one manifest the true nature and law of things from within and unconsciously, and at last become one with heaven and earth. — Lao Tzu

Without desire there is stillness, and the world settles by itself. — Lao Tzu

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive. — Kurt Vonnegut

Passivity is the same as defending injustice. — Deepak Chopra

Tao invariably takes no action, and yet there is nothing left undone. — Lao Tzu

When there is no desire, all things are at peace — Lao Tzu

When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. — Lao Tzu

When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. — Lao Tzu

Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. — Beatrice Warde

The world is made up not only of good and evil, but also of those who do nothing. — Alexei Navalny

Short Inert Quotes

  • The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people. — Louis D. Brandeis
  • It is not a loss of inert, amorphous tissue, but of a growing being unique in history. — Frederica Mathewes-Green
  • Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice. — Shoshana Zuboff
  • And what can still delight an inert stone except to become, once more, the bed of a raging torrent? — Julien Gracq
  • I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. — Fran Lebowitz
  • Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful. — Alfred North Whitehead
  • Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. — Donna J. Haraway
  • A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space. — Gaston Bachelard
  • What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were? — Mary McCarthy
  • The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Being Ignored Quotes

Ignorance is servitude, because as a man thinks, so he is; a man who does not think for himself and allows himself to be guided by the thought of another is like the beast led by a halter. — Jose Rizal

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. — Soren Kierkegaard

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life. — Frank Lloyd Wright

To live our lives and miss that great purpose we were designed to accomplish is truly a sin. It is inconceivable that we could be bored in a world with so much wrong to tackle, so much ignorance to reach and so much misery we could alleviate — William Wilberforce

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. — Frederick Douglass

White people’s number one freedom, in the United States of America, is the freedom to be totally ignorant of those who are other than white. We don’t have to learn about those who are other than white. And our number two freedom is the freedom to deny that we’re ignorant. — Jane Elliott

To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge. — Nicolaus Copernicus

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.” Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin

Wisdom leads to unity, but ignorance to separation. So long as God seems to be outside and far away, there is ignorance. But when God is realised within, that is true knowledge. — Ramakrishna

Fearing The Unknown Quotes

The fear of death is far greater than the death itself. But the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all! — The Undertaker

By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us. — Alan Watts

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown — H. P. Lovecraft

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself-and possibly teh bogey man. — Pat Paulsen

We are not to be anxious about the unknown future or to fret about it. We are to live in a moment-by-moment dependence upon God. — James Montgomery Boice

The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress. — Michael E. DeBakey

Instead of fearing the unknown - all the bad that can happen - realize that good things can surprise you as well. — Lewis Howes

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom. — Maya Angelou

There are people with a lot of prejudice, a lot of fear of the unknown. They think that immigration is a danger, when really it is a solution. This is an interesting issue, because it will be a central question of our time. — Mario Vargas Llosa

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. — Thich Nhat Hanh

People Writing About Inert

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu
quotes on balance, life and leadership

1418 11725
Read quotes by Joan D. Vinge

Joan D. Vinge
quotes on education, friendship and love

41 419
Read quotes by Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer
quotes on art, politics and communism

84 300
Read quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche
quotes on god, love and morality

2473 32550
Read quotes by Mason Cooley

Mason Cooley
quotes on culture, justice and freedom

1227 2367
Read quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut
quotes on writing, love and war

1005 5935

More Inert Quotes

I can concede that the government has no knowledge of the people, but I believe the people know less of the government. There are useless officials, evil, if you like, but there are also good ones, and these are not able to accomplish anything because they encounter an inert mass, the population that takes little part in matters that concern them. — Jose Rizal

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

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. — Donna J. Haraway

REM sleep can even take a step back, so to speak, and divine overarching insights and gist: something akin to general knowledge—that is, what a collection of information means as a whole, not just an inert back catalogue of facts. We can awake the next morning with new solutions to previously intractable problems. — Matthew Walker

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

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

It is because the public are a mass -- inert, obtuse, and passive -- that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are -- and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence. — Alfred Jarry

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

The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery. — Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. — Henry Adams

Space expands or contracts in the tensions and functions through which it exists. Space is not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforces; space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life. — Hans Hofmann

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

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

The great enemy of knowledge is not error, but inertness. All that we want is discussion; and then we are sure to do well, no matter what our blunders may be. One error conflicts with another, each destroys its opponent, and truth is evolved. — Henry Thomas Buckle

What appears to be the established order of present-day civilization is actually only the inert but spectacular momentum of a high velocity vehicle whose engine has already stopped functioning. — Jose Arguelles

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

I never heard of anybody who admired the character of sheep. Even the gentlest human personalities in contact with them are annoyed by their lack of brains, courage and initiative, by their extraordinary ability to get themselves into uncomfortable or dangerous situations and then wait in inert helplessness for someone to rescue them. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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

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

I think there's nothing worse than inertia. You can inert and study your navel and gradually you'll fall off the chair. I think the key is to keep flying. — Ridley Scott

[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68). — Neil Postman

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

The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit; is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me. — Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

I find greater companionship in inert figures, animals and Speechless artifacts, for I can enjoy their presence and there is no psychic drain. — Anton Szandor LaVey

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

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

Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates. — Samuel Johnson

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

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

Other people are joyous, like on the feast of the ox, like on the way up to the terrace in the spring. I alone am inert, giving no sign, like a newborn baby who has not learned to smile. — Lao Tzu

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

We are living in a world where major states and large geopolitical projects have to prove their competitive edge. It is clear, as well, that with regard to the intensifying American-Chinese confrontation and the inert power of a united Europe, Russia has to make up its mind - because it is losing ground as an independent center of power. — Garry Kasparov

Things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within. — Marcus Aurelius

We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones, knowing they will go on, inert or burning, and I was discovering, naming all the these things: it was my destiny to love and say goodbye. — Pablo Neruda

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

It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. — Charles Sanders Peirce

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

This Being out of God cannot, by any means, be a limited, completed, and inert Being, since God himself is not such a dead Being, but, on the contrary, is Life; but it can only be a Power, since only a Power is the true formal picture or Schema of Life. And indeed it can only be the Power of realising that which is contained in itself a Schema. — Johann Gottlieb Fichte

A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back. — Gustave Flaubert

In Conclusion

Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of inert quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about inert to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.

Citation

Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of inert quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.

Embed HTML Link

Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage