Top 100 Idle Quotes
#2. Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home:
Is this a holiday? what! know you not,
Being mechanical, you ought not walk
Upon a labouring day without the sign
Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou?
William Shakespeare
#3. For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of "Is your novel an open work or not?" How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or "With which of your characters do you identify?" For God's sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.
Umberto Eco
#4. It is not by idle chance that I have come here.
Holly Weiss
#6. She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren't nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they were meant to do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#7. Sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the notion that one is discovering the past when really one is inventing it, using a guidebook as a scenario of swift notations.
Paul Theroux
#8. Never let the brain idle. 'An idle mind is the devil's workshop.' And the devil's name is Alzheimer's.
George Carlin
#9. Goddesses never die. They slip in and out of the world's cities, in and out of our dreams, century after century, answering to different names, dressed differently, perhaps even disguised, perhaps idle and unemployed, their official altars abandoned, their temples feared or simply forgotten.
Phyllis Chesler
#10. Even an idle phone conversation when driving takes a 40 percent bite out of your focus and, surprisingly, can have the same effect as being drunk.
Gary W. Keller
#11. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#12. Surely man was not created to be an idle fellow; he was not set in this universal orchard to stand still as a tree.
Thomas Dekker
#13. My creative powers have been reduced to a restless indolence. I cannot be idle, yet I cannot seem to do anything either. I have no imagination, no more feeling for nature, and reading has become repugnant to me. When we are robbed of ourselves, we are robbed of everything.
Sally Brampton
#14. Always plenty to do. Cannot well be idle and believe will rather wear out than rust out.
Henry J. Heinz
#15. The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether - very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time.
Bill Bryson
#16. Ah," said Arthur, "er ... " He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman's husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.
Douglas Adams
#17. There is not a thing on the face of the earth that I abhor so much as idleness or idle people.
George Whitefield
#18. If I'm at a party, and there are lots of people running around, you'll most likely find me on the floor, painting ... I want to be at the party, but I want to do something. I'm just not very idle at all.
Alison Mosshart
#19. My day starts at 5 A.M. and gets over at 10:30 P.M. Its a long day but I love it ... I can't sit idle.
Esha Gupta
#20. I forget how many thousand eggs go wrong for one codfish that gets hatched. But as Berkeley said long ago, it is idle to censure the creation as wasteful if you believe in a creator who has unlimited stuff to play with.
Frederick Pollock
#21. We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
W.S. Gilbert
#23. Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love.
Ovid
#24. In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.'
Bill Bryson
#25. God did not intend for us to be idle and unproductive. There is dignity in work.
Billy Graham
#26. Plough not the seas, sow not the sands,Leave off your idle pain;Seek other mistress for your minds,Love's service is in vain.
Robert Southwell
#27. Thanks be to God. Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.
Samuel Pepys
#28. All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
H.L. Mencken
#30. Purge your mind of all aimless and idle thoughts, especially those that pry into the affairs of others or wish them ill.
Marcus Aurelius
#31. The slothful are always ready to engage in idle talk of what will be done tomorrow, and every day after.
John Lyly
#32. God loves an idle rainbow, no less than laboring seas.
Ralph Hodgson
#33. I am happiest when I am idle. I could live for months without performing any kind of labor, and at the expiration of that time I should feel fresh and vigorous enough to go right on in the same way for numerous more months.
Artemus Ward
#34. There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
Aldo Leopold
#35. Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.
Charles Dudley Warner
#38. That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.
Henry Ford
#39. 'Habibi' is a complex and unapologetic work of fantasy - no idle undertaking for readers of any faith or no faith at all, but one well worth the trouble.
G. Willow Wilson
#40. The Sphinx is missing a nose. Someone shot it off in a moment of idle desecration - some say it was Mameluke Turks, others, Napoleonic soldiers.
Carl Sagan
#41. There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit, when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never been.
Charles Dickens
#42. They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.
Socrates
#43. The idle wife ranked with the ornamentally wrought weapon and with the splendid offering to the gods as a measure of the man's power to waste, and therefore his superiority over other men ... As is the case with any other object of art, her uselessness is her use.
Emily James Smith Putnam
#44. Cheer is for fools with idle minds. I am neither a fool nor idle.
Rachel E. Carter
#45. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.
Joan Didion
#46. I listen to a little Marina & The Diamonds. She has a song called 'Teen Idle' that I really like.
Lana Del Rey
#47. If u r self-inspired to turn idle curiosity into an active quest, u r living at the fullest else ordianarism prevails.
Sushobhan
#49. Although even when I am being idle I have plenty of food for thought both early and late - thoughts both about and not about art.
Gustav Klimt
#50. After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.
George Eliot
#51. And indeed, here I am posing an idle question of my own now: which is better - cheap happiness or sublime suffering?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#52. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair, and I will begin to think again.
Sylvia Plath
#53. Think not that when thou art dry and darksom in the presence of God, with faith and silence, that thou do'st nothing, that thou losest time, and that thou are idle, because not to wait on God, according to the saying of St. Bernard (Tom.5.in Fract. de vit. solit.c.8.p. 90.), is the greatest idleness
Miguel De Molinos
#54. As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.
Bram Stoker
#56. He was met even now As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud; Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.
William Shakespeare
#57. When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?
John C. Dvorak
#58. My arms have mutinied against me - brutes!
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,
My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.
Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease.
Wilfred Owen
#59. Sick I am of idle words, past all reconciling, Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling; The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel.
George Du Maurier
#61. Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.
Oscar Wilde
#62. There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, For I am armed so strong in honesty That they pass by me as the idle wind
William Shakespeare
#63. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It
Max Weber
#65. You had felt idle in this city through which you had paced only to kill time. But the emptiness that you believed yourself confronted with was an illusion: you had filled those moments with sensations all the more powerful in that nothing and no one had distracted you from them.
Edouard Leve
#66. He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed.
Socrates
#67. Idle to pretend that we have lost paradise. We never had it; it is still to make.
Susan Ertz
#68. Put into actions what you dream of achieving. It'll amaze you to discover that you can do more than you ever dream of. Just give it a try! Never be idle, take actions now!
Israelmore Ayivor
#69. A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
Kahlil Gibran
#70. Imagination without initiative would more properly be called idle daydreaming.
James Van Fleet
#71. For Hindus to expect Islam, Christianity or Zoroastrianism to be driven out of India is as idle a dream as it would be for Mussalmans to have only Islam of their imagination rule the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
#72. A golf course outside a big town serves an excellent purpose in that it segregates, as though a concentration camp, all the idle and idiot well-to-do.
Osbert Sitwell
#73. It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics.
Henry David Thoreau
#75. I don't think I'll ever become used to you Ellis sisters' penchant for whisky."
She waved an idle hand as she surveyed the room. "We're half Scottish. I think there might be a law against us not liking it.
Kristen Callihan
#76. We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in
the idle fancy that we already know
or that it is of no use seeking to
know what we do not know.
Plato
#77. He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood.
James Joyce
#78. How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.
Washington Irving
#79. Although it has been said that idle hands are the devil's workshop, when it comes to teenagers, both idle and active hands are the devil's workshop.
Amy Sedaris
#80. Our lives show the accumulation of all of our varied wishes. Wanting something with all your heart will begin to slough away all of your untrue and idle wishes. Success comes from an undivided heart.
Chuck Spezzano
#81. As someone who makes his living as an actor, my routine varies almost every day. There are weeks I'm working and weeks I'm not. People think it must be great to have all that time off, but you'd be surprised how quickly that grass would become greener. The idle brain is the devil's playground.
Eric Lange
#82. Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject.
Carl Hiaasen
#83. So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination ... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation.
Michel De Montaigne
#84. People count with self-satisfaction the number of times they have recited the name of God on their prayer beads, but they keep no beads for reckoning the number of idle words they speak.
Al-Ghazali
#85. Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and
brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years?
Polybius
#86. Raking over the past and sifting its dust is an occupation for the idle or the elderly retired.
Armand Hammer
#87. Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
E.B. White
#88. For a few brief days the orchards are white with blossoms. They soon turn to fruit, or else float away, useless and wasted, upon the idle breeze. So will it be with present feelings. They must be deepened into decision, or be entirely dissipated by delay.
Theodore L. Cuyler
#89. The evils of the body are murder, theft, and adultery; of the tongue, lying, slander, abuse and idle talk; of the mind, covetousness, hatred and error.
Gautama Buddha
#90. I'd hate to see any descendants of mine fall into the category of what I'd call 'idle rich' - a group I've never had much use for.
Sam Walton
#91. Despite the universality of this change, which we're all buffeted by, there is a single, seemingly small change that I'll be most sorry about. It will sound meaningless, but: One doesn't see teenagers staring into space anymore. Gone is the idle mind of the adolescent.
Michael Harris
#92. I am not the only one that condemns the idle; for once when I was going to give our minister a pretty long list of the sins of one of our people that he was asking after, I began with, "He's dreadfully lazy." "That's enough," said the old gentleman; " all sorts of sins are in that one.
Charles Spurgeon
#93. And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#94. It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.
William Ernest Henley
#95. It is better to sit alone than in company with the bad, and it is better still to sit with the good than alone. It is better to speak to a seeker of knowledge than to remain silent, but silence is better than idle words.
Muhammad
#96. It is, we believe, Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump Can extinguish hell.
Henry Reed
#97. Where there are millions upon millions of units of idle labour, it is no use thinking of labour-saving devices.
Mahatma Gandhi
#98. Every key belongs to a lock, and every lock contains a secret. My mind churns for the truth that you hold. Why are you here? I never desired this for you, yet I am curious to know. Is this idle gaud the answer I seek, or is it merely the old memory of a dream I thought I once lived?
H.S. Crow
#99. Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the idle, but it is not education.
John Henry Newman
#100. Thus God himself was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures signing his likeness unto the world: therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of Geometria.
Johannes Kepler
