Best Stasis Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

Source: All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“For humanity everything passes without a trace. Of course, it’s possible that by randomly pulling chestnuts out of this fire, we’ll eventually stumble on something that will make life on Earth completely unbearable. That would be bad luck. But you have to admit, that’s a danger humanity has always faced [...] You see, I’ve long since become unused to discussing humanity as a whole. Humanity as a whole is too stable a system, nothing upsets it.”

Humanity Stasis

Book:Roadside Picnic

Source: Roadside Picnic

“Treating ‘life’ as an object to which we are more or less adequate excises crucial elements from life just at the very time that we are living it: such elements as sleep, rest, laziness, and the absence of labour, energy, and work. To say that these kinds of stasis are not living is not only to limit the plurality of life but to make it lopsided, tipping it towards the stresses that we find in modernity’s cult of perpetual activity.”

Living Stasis

Book:Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

Source: Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“It wasn't exactly like I'd sold out on my life and dreams and all that other bullshit, because the truth was I'd never actually had anything to sell. It was more like I slowly froze in place, inside my little office at the museum; more like some part of me just fell asleep one day and never woke up.”

Failure Disappointment Stasis

Book:Waking the Moon

Source: Waking the Moon

“The moment stasis is achieved in my life, it begins to shift. Biologically speaking, stasis is death.”

Change Biology Impermanence Stasis

Book:Naked

Source: Naked

“I didn't want the sun to rise. I didn't want the world to continue turning. I wanted the whole planet put into stasis until I could catch up.”

World Truth Stasis

Book:A Long, Long Sleep

Source: A Long, Long Sleep

“Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.”

Life Change Health Mental Health Growth Mindset Change Management Flux Stasis Practical Philosophy

Book:Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Source: Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

“Progress might be inevitable, but there was no reason they should knuckle under without a fight.”

Change Progress Reactionaries Stasis

Book:Into the Beautiful North

Source: Into the Beautiful North

“Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?.”

Ifs Humans Wells Universe Individual Human Beings Progress Evolution Fundamentals Series Desirable Permanence Hallmark Flux Alterations Stasis

Book:Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Source: Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“When we ask for heaven, we are asking for stasis. A form of comfort that will last for eternity. Yes, that is what we all want, the way we understand happiness.”

Way Want Lasts Form Asks Heaven Comfort Eternity Asking Stasis

Book:How to Wish

Source: How to Wish

“Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”

Melancholy Tails Coins Utopia Utopian Revulsion Stasis

Author:Gunter Grass

“Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own rightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent.”

“I can never quite decide whether the anti-Columbus movement is merely risible or faintly sinister. It is sinister, though, because it is an ignorant celebration of stasis and backwardness, with an unpleasant tinge of self-hatred.”

I Can Self Movement Hatred Ignorant Celebration Never Quit Sinister Columbus Self Hatred Stasis

Author:Christopher Hitchens

“Disaster beats stasis. Better a rolling stone than a moss-covered rock.”

Rocks Beats Stones Disaster Covered Rolling Rolling Stones Moss Stasis

Book:The Quit

Source: The Quit

“Cooking saved my life! Sure, there were some miserable moments, but that was sort of the point, to find something challenging and consuming enough to take a place in the center of my life into which was creeping a horrible feeling of stasis and the doom of mediocrity.”

Enough Moments Feelings Challenges Food Cooking Saved Horrible Miserable Culinary Mediocrity Doom Consuming Stasis

Author:Julie Powell

“Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.”

Men Humans Generations Divine Civilization Western Ancient Immortality Sensitive Cycles Succession Fortresses Stasis

Author:Marguerite Yourcenar

“Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.”

Mean Desire Forever Familiar Chiefs Immortality Submit Transforming Freeze Neurosis Rigidity Hold Fast Estrangement Stasis

Book:What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

Source: What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

“If Abstract Expression reached for the sublime, Pop turned ordinary imagery into icons. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol illuminated the transformative power of context and the process of reproduction. Claes Oldenburg's soft ice-cream cones and hamburgers changed sculpture from hard to soft, from stasis to transformation.”

Ifs World Two Happens Differences Similarity Equilibrium Stasis

Author:Youngme Moon

“Maybe it'll be like 'The Simpsons,' and everybody will remain unchanged. Maybe that's what 'Glee''s about. Maybe this is kind of a stasis show. I don't know.”

Knows Kind Shows Glee Stasis

Author:Cory Monteith

“Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language.”

Evil Found Language Common Danger Greek Remarkable Conventional Translations Factions Stasis

Author:Moses Finley

“I think buildings should imitate ecological systems. Ecological systems in nature before we had human beings you know interfere with them exist in a state of stasis - they are self-supporting, self-sustaining.”

Thinking Should Humans Self States Nature Human Beings Existence Support Building Architecture Interfere Ecology Ecological Ecosystems Sustaining Stasis

Author:Ken Yeang

“For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won't change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.”

Source: Three trips in time and space: original novellas of science fiction

“How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis-a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism-a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition?”

World Feels Individual Creation Civilization Discovery Embrace Constant Competition Evolve Who We Are Dynamism Stasis

Book:The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise,

Source: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise,

“Size will hurt returns. Look at Berkshire Hathaway - the last five things Warren has done have generated returns that are splendid by historical standards, but now give him $100 billion in assets and measure outcomes across all of it, it doesn't look so good. We can only buy big positions, and the only time we can get big positions is during a horrible period of decline or stasis. That really doesn't happen very often.”

Giving Looks Done Bigs Happens Lasts Hurt Five Position Return Periods Standards Historical Size Billions Horrible Outcomes Assets Decline Only Time Splendid Stasis

Author:Charlie Munger

“Language is a theme in the whole book, no? I mean it ends with the title poem about words are all we have. I guess midrash makes sense. How does it change in the course of the sequence? Well, God is into No and into Stasis/Nouns. Adam and Eve, in order to be in this world (and get this world going) must choose verbs. Which is to gain sex but also to choose death and all else that goes with change. To choose becoming over being.”

World Wells Mean Doe Book Ends Whole Order Courses Language Sex This World Becoming Gains Make Sense Titles Theme Adam Sequence Verbs Adam And Eve Nouns Stasis

Author:Gregory Orr

“Love and happiness inextricably combined? I wanted love stories to coincide with war stories, I wanted hope for my characters, I wanted a sense of a future. So do they. So does the reader. But perhaps I shouldn't speak for everyone when I say that love and happiness are interdependent. In my own experience, happiness came with love. Specifically, my wife. That's when my own apathy and stasis ended for good.”

Doe War Character Stories Wanted Speak My Own Wife Reader My Wife Love Story Apathy Happiness And Love War Stories Stasis Wanted Love

Author:Said Sayrafiezadeh

“One patient had severe pre-treatment pain resulting from skeletal meta-stases...at 5 weeks after the onset of (laetrile and metabolic) therapy, she claimed complete relief.”

Age Pain Dark Week Patient Medical Therapy Relief Treatment Severe Dark Ages Stasis

Author:Charles Moertel

“[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.”

Thinking Done America Felt Barack Being Done Stasis Gridlock

Author:Ron Suskind

“It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.”

Ends Growth Ambition Chivalry Stasis

Author:Bono

“And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.”

People Mean Moving Chance Criminals Communion Stasis

Book:You Shall Know Our Velocity

Source: You Shall Know Our Velocity

“Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”

Real Social Instruments Terror Command Boredom Anguish Tedium Stasis Social Control

Book:Humboldt's Gift

Source: Humboldt's Gift

“Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.”

Form Horror Weight Fear Of Death Stasis

Author:William S. Burroughs

“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.”

Perfect Offers Bed Opposites Eternity Stillness Glimpse Default Inertia Drawbacks Inactivity Stasis

Book:Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir

Source: Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir

“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”

Writing Doe Ends Eye Lying Purpose Sides Water Cutting Century Students Wind Periods Paper Agree Woods Decades Length Nevertheless Arbitrary Fluid Dots Punctuation Stasis

Author:Margaret Atwood

“Hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch.”

“Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual findings of paleontology. Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record.”

Source: One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought

“Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.”

Source: Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution

“It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual completely continuous transitional sequences.”

Knows Levels Known Records Evolution Remains Species Categories Fossils Sequence Stasis

Author:George Gaylord Simpson

“Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.”

Process Natural Views Study Students Evolution Argument Accounts Paid Data Preserves Experts Fancy Selection Fossils Natural Selection Stasis

Author:Stephen Jay Gould

“One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approachings of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn’t matter if you’re rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn’t change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable for ever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.”

“There are sacred moments in life when we experience in rational and very direct ways that separation, the boundary between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and Nature, is illusion. Oneness is reality. We can experience that stasis is illusory and that reality is continual flux and change on very subtle and also on gross levels of perception . . . When people bother you in any way, it is because their souls are trying to get your divine attention and your blessing.”

“I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”

Next Speak Progress Insight Melancholy Tails Coins Utopia Utopian Revulsion Stasis

Author:Gunter Grass

“Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.”

Reality Desire Revolution Becoming Utopia Eros Stasis

Author:Murray Bookchin

“The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.”

Way Long Quality Records Periods Clothes Species Patterns Conservative Observation Yield Entity Fossils Emperor Static Long Periods Of Time Stasis New Clothes Recalcitrant

Author:Niles Eldredge

“Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”

Found Speak Records Expected Predictions Fossils Conservatism Rough Times Lineage Stasis Gradual Change

Author:Niles Eldredge

“I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis.”

Knows Feels Dream Nostalgia Useless Stasis Useless Things

Author:Mira Nair

“Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer.”

Ifs Reality Truth Lying Term Comfort Truth Is Dancer Supplies Platitudes Lies Truth Stasis

Book:Time and the Art of Living

Source: Time and the Art of Living

“One of the aspects of form that I have been very interested in is stasis - the concept of form which is not so directional in time, not so much climactic form, but rather form which allows time, to stand still.”

Has Beens Stills Form Time Concepts Aspect Stasis

Author:La Monte Young

“If war can indeed be turned into a relic, then the virtue of greed will recede further. From a given society's standpoint, one big upside of wanton material acquisition has traditionally been the way it drives technological progress-which, after all, helps keep societies strong. In the nineteenth century, Russia ans Germany had little choice about modernizing; in those days stasis invited conquest. But if societies no longer face conquest, breakneck technological advance is an offer they can refuse, and frugality a luxury people can afford.”

Source: Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny