A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
Interpretation
Active and resilient thinkers tend to exhaust their relationships and interests over time.
This quote by H. L. Mencken suggests that individuals who are constantly engaged in thought and exploration may find that their friendships, romantic relationships, and political beliefs lose vitality as they evolve. The idea is that the very nature of a curious and dynamic mind leads one to outgrow or become disillusioned with various aspects of life, including the connections and passions they once held dear.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about the challenges of maintaining relationships in a rapidly changing world.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
For a man's counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger.
My dad said, 'In school, be a Catholic. At home, be a Hindu.' So we did both.
We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
Hatred. Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. Veronika wanted to spend her remaining two or three days of life behaving as inappropriately as she could.
Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock." - Frankenstein p115
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