Accidia Quotes

#1. The symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#2. Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.

Evelyn Waugh

#3. Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.

Ian Fleming

#4. I've always tried to work hard. I'm not trying to show anybody up or do something spectacular for attention.

Roy Halladay

#5. The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything's on its head, it's a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction ...

Thomas Pynchon

#6. Of course, an unchanged mind is a little like unchanged underwear. It tends to get unattractive even to the person whose mind or underwear it is.

Daniel Pinkwater

#7. There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.

John C. Calhoun

#8. Unless you've touched a corpse before, you can't comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother's face.

Elan Mastai

#9. The church should train the Ritz Carlton on how to serve people.

Jeff Henderson

#10. Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.

James Merrill

#11. If you're in the game long enough, you're going to be the toast of the town one day, and the next day you'll be toast.

Alan K. Simpson

#12. The government shouldn't step in at the first stage and create land banks. Industry should buy the land as much as they can, and if they get stuck, then the government should step in.

Jamshyd Godrej

#13. Every single tune you know from the 1940s until the 1970s was written, arranged, and demoed in the Brill Building. OK, maybe not every song, but writers from Benny Goodman to Lieber & Stoller to Neil Diamond all kept offices there.

Shawn Amos

#14. The inside of the Pentagon is an incredible place and a dramatic set. We do [travel] outside, but the inside workings of the civilian oversight of the military inside the Pentagon is really about as exciting as anything you ever want to deal with. It is really amazing.

Dennis Hopper