Immobility Quotes

The task of the educator of young children lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity. (Maria Montessori)

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Yann Martel

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

Henry Miller

Equivalence signifies uniformity and thus immobility.

Viktor Schauberger

A time will come when the picture will no longer be enough. Its immobility will become an archaism with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colours as feelings within itself. Multiplied colours will not need form to be understood and paintings will be swirling musical compositions of great coloured gases, which, on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet conceive of.

Umberto Boccioni

Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. Live in Time. Be static - with movement. For a static of the present movement. Resist the anxious wish to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living. Stop insisting on 'values' which can only break down. Be free, live. Stop painting time. Stop evoking movements and gestures. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present, live once more in Time and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality.

Jean Tinguely

Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions.

Tristan Tzara

Death is not yet dead everywhere. Some points and surfaces still resist and budge and cry out, doubtless because it is dawn; and once the wind swept away a muffled bugle-call. There are some who still burn with the invisible fire of fever, in spite of the frozen periods they have crossed. But the cold is working into them. The immobility of lifeless things is passing into them, and the wind empties itself as it goes by.

Henri Barbusse

The man did not move because only immobility could hurt more than motion: the man held himself still because to move might lessen his suffering, and that he could not bear. For him only pain had meaning.

Matthew Stover

I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in the levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled.

Don DeLillo

And it was this that awed him - the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. (Thomas Wolfe)

Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility.

Dorothea Brande

The Churches as Churches-as institutions affirming their own infallibility-are anti-Christian institutions. Between the Churches as such and Christianity, not only is there nothing in common except the name, but they are two quite opposite and opposing principles. The one represents pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility and death: the other humility, penitence, meekness, progress, and life.

Leo Tolstoy

The worldly man lives in society, marries, establishes a family; Yoga prescribes absolute solitude and chastity. The worldly man is "possessed” by his own life; the yogin refuses to "let himself live”; to continual movement, he opposes his static posture, the immobility of āsana; to agitated, unrhythmical, changing respiration, he opposes prānāyāma, and even dreams of holding his breath indefinitely; to the chaotic flux of psychomental life, he replies by "fixing thought on a single point,” the first step to that final withdrawal from the phenomenal world which he will obtain through pratyāhāra. All of the yogic techniques invite to one and the same gesture-to do exactly the opposite of what human nature forces one to do. From solitude and chastity to samyama, there is no solution of continuity. The orientation always remains the same-to react against the "normal,” "secular,” and finally "human” inclination.

Mircea Eliade

The immobility that the artist creates is not at all that of the photograph. A worth of art contains latent life, possibility of movement; a grimace made eternal does not represent life. One always talks of w:Donatello, but never of della Quercia. Yet della Qercia invented w:Michelangelo's style before Michelangelo.

Aristide Maillol

The more immobile Egyptian statues are, the more it seems as if they would move.... immobility of the body does not mean immobility of the flesh; in my model for the monument to Cézanne the whole figure is quiet, but there are several movements in the torso.

Aristide Maillol

The hardness and immobility of material gave me more satisfaction tan true-to-life representations.

Fritz Wotruba

Hobbesian state power was not intended for greatness, but to curtail challenges from below. It succeeded when its subjects merely stood still or got out of its way. Their immobility was the outward sign of their fear ... a fear all the more potent for the minimal power that aroused it.

Corey Robin

The migratory movement is at once perpetual, partial and universal. It never ceases, it affects every people ... [and although] at a given moment it sets in motion only a small number of each population ... in fact there is never a moment of immobility for any people, because no migration remains isolated.

Eugene M. Kulischer

There is no more striking illustration of the immobility of British institutions than the House of Commons.

H. H. Asquith

Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling. (Nikos Kazantzakis)

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

Rebecca West

They study the characteristics of law, and instead of perpetual growth corresponding to that of the human race, they find its distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day by day.

Peter Kropotkin

All hopes and despairs vanish in the voracious, funneling whirlwind of God. God laughs, wails, kills, sets us on fire, and then leaves us in the middle of the way, charred embers. And I rejoice to feel between my temples, in the flicker of an eyelid, the beginning and the end of the world. I condense into a lightning moment the seeding, sprouting, blossoming, fructifying, and the disappearance of every tree, animal, man, star, and god. All Earth is a seed planted in the coils of my mind. Whatever struggles for numberless years to unfold and fructify in the dark womb of matter bursts in my head like a small and silent lightning flash. Ah! let us gaze intently on this lightning flash, let us hold it for a moment, let us arrange it into human speech. Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling.

Nikos Kazantzakis