Top 100 Quotes About Idleness
#1. Constant idleness should be included in the tortures of hell, but it is, on the contrary, considered to be one of the joys of paradise.
Leo Tolstoy
#2. It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.
Tim Winton
#3. our sole delight was play; and for this we were punished by those who yet themselves were doing the like. But elder folks' idleness is called "business"; that of boys, being really the same, is punished by those elders;
Anonymous
#5. When it is mid week, pause and ponder! The very single days we disregard are what become the very years we wished to have used effectively and efficiently. If we disregard today, we shall remember our had I know tomorrow. Time changes therefore think of the changing times.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#6. Proverbs 19:15-16 15 Lazy people sleep soundly, but idleness leaves them hungry. 16 Keep the commandments and keep your life; despising them leads to death.
Anonymous
#7. We may regard certain days as free days. Free days are however fee days. We will pay later
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#8. There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.
Thomas Carlyle
#9. It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.
Anthony Trollope
#11. Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms, its persecutions and its devices for fattening idleness on the earnings of the people.
Thomas Jefferson
#12. So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.
Pliny The Younger
#14. We do not lack strength so much as the will to use it; and very often our imagining that things are impossible is nothing but an excuse of our own contriving, to reconcile ourselves to our own idleness.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#15. My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.
Virginia Woolf
#16. the upper classes instinctively abandoned idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned.
Thomas Piketty
#17. Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide,
First strip off all her equipage of Pride,
Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,
Or Learning's Luxury or idleness,
Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain
Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.
Alexander Pope
#18. True, it would not be a new venture for him. But need it be? Could one possibly accuse him of nostalgia or idleness, of wasting his time simply because he had read the story two or three times before?
Amor Towles
#20. Simplifying our lives does not mean sinking into idleness, but on the contrary, getting rid of the most subtle aspect of laziness: the one which makes us take on thousands of less important activities.
Matthieu Ricard
#21. Idleness ruins the constitution
Ovid
#22. Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.
George MacDonald
#23. Mistakes are good, successes are great, and idleness is a sin.
Mike Michalowicz
#25. Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.
Hesiod
#26. I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention ... arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
Agatha Christie
#27. And to the English court assemble now, From every region, apes of idleness!
William Shakespeare
#28. Of all our faults, the one we avow most easily is idleness; we persuade ourselves that it is allied to all the peaceable virtues,and as for the others, that it does not destroy them utterly, but only suspends the exercise of their functions.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#29. National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
Samuel Smiles
#30. The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
Oscar Wilde
#31. So many people die though they live, and it is not as if they don't have life; they only refuse to keep breathing!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#32. I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.
Primo Levi
#34. Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind.
Henry Ford
#36. Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
Benjamin Franklin
#37. IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.
Ambrose Bierce
#38. Hereditary wealth is in reality a premium paid to idleness.
William Godwin
#39. You haven't done your best yet because you haven't seen the best you can do yet. You are where you are now because you haven't seen where you can be yet. If you see, your attitude, thought and tactics towards life will definitely change
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#40. Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.
Stanislaw Lem
#41. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
Paul Lafargue
#42. Bleeding, idleness and mist, he murmured in an unusual mood of poetry.
It's like life, isn't it...
First the wound, then the resting, and then the uncertainty of it all.
Leon Garfield
#44. Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.
Tom Hodgkinson
#45. A few days of idleness have completely sickened me, and given me what is called the blue-devils so severely, that I feel that the sooner I go to work and drive them off, the better.
John James Audubon
#46. If you think of something, do it.
Plenty of people often think, I'd like to do this, or that.
Lydia Davis
#47. The savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but the philosopher lives simply through wisdom.
Henry David Thoreau
#48. Fear is nothing but idleness of the will ...
Eliphas Levi
#50. Gluttony and idleness are two of life's great joys, but they are not honourable.
Julie Burchill
#51. The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
T. S. Eliot
#54. For his part, Blind Seer had no difficulty accepting idleness. A wolf proverb stated: Hunt when hungry, sleep when not, for hunger always returns.
Jane Lindskold
#55. When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness, ... then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift ... every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If only youth knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#56. Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness.
William Ralph Inge
#59. That the crowd always likes a holiday is a common saying, but when the whole year becomes one long holiday, and nobody has time for attending to his business, and pleasure becomes compulsory, then it is a different matter.
Robert Graves
#60. It is weakness which makes us hate an enemy and seek revenge, and it is idleness that pacifies us and causes us to neglect it.
Jean De La Bruyere
#61. It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., which are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature.
Lord Melbourne
#62. Labor is life! 'Tis the still water faileth;
Idleness ever despaireth, bewaileth;
Keep the watch wound, for the dark rust assaileth.
Frances Sargent Osgood
#63. Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.
Tom Hodgkinson
#64. There is no idleness, by which we are so easily seduced, as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business, and by making the loiterer imagine that he has something to do which must not be neglected, keeps him in perpetual agitation, and hurries him rapidly from place to place.
Samuel Johnson
#65. Don't you read or get read to?" The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!
Charles Dickens
#66. I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
E. M. Forster
#67. Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.
Anthony Burgess
#68. Give me the boy who rouses when he is praised, who profits when he is encouraged and who cries when he is defeated. Such a boy will be fired by ambition; he will be stung by reproach, and animated by preference; never shall I apprehend any bad consequences from idleness in such a boy.
Quintilian
#69. Laughing is not the first expression of joy ... A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears ...
Margaret Oliphant
#70. If time, like money, could be laid by while one was not using it, there might be some excuse for the idleness of half of the world, but yet not a full one. For even this would be such an economy as the living on a principal sum, without making it purchase interest.
Laurence Sterne
#71. Even if you can't dance, you can shake your body. Even if you can't sing, you can make some noise.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#72. Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.
Farley Mowat
#73. Equality is. one of the most consummate scoundrels that ever crept from the brain of a political juggler
a fellow who thrusts his hand into the pocket of honest industry or enterprising talent, and squanders their hard-earned profits on profligate idleness or indolent stupidity.
James Kirke Paulding
#74. Acting is a lot of waiting to be picked, and I like to do a lot of things at once. I think I will have to find things that are totally mine. I have so much comfort that school and my academic life are totally mine. I hope that there's not a lot of idleness in my future.
Sarah Steele
#76. Poverty is not dishonorable in itself, but only when it comes from idleness, intemperance, extravagance, and folly.
Plutarch
#77. There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully.
Charlotte Bronte
#78. I never spend a day in idleness; I appropriate even a part of the night for study. I do not allow time for sleep but yield to it when I must, and when my eyes are wearied with waking and ready to fall shut, I keep them at their task.
Seneca.
#79. [Hayward] honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophical calm ... He was an idealist.
W. Somerset Maugham
#80. Ay! idleness! the rich folks never fail
To find some reason why the poor deserve
Their miseries.
Robert Southey
#81. In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasure
George Eliot
#82. The Book of Proverbs deals very hard blows against sluggards, and Christian ministers do well frequently to denounce the great sin of idleness, which is the mother of a huge family of sins.
Charles Spurgeon
#84. Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#85. A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
Simone De Beauvoir
#86. The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground an piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness.
J.M. Coetzee
#87. Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness
they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#88. It has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.
Edward Gibbon
#89. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#90. In particular, he named three kinds of troubles that could beset a person with a nervous temperament: poor weather, isolation or idleness, and stressful events.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
#91. Remove the temptation of idleness and Cupid's bow is useless.
Ovid
#92. He now paid the allowance that permitted his son to live in frugal idleness.
Joseph O'Neill
#93. The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
Oscar Wilde
#94. No man can perform so little as not to have reason to congratulate himself on his merits, when he beholds the multitude that live in total idleness, and have never yet endeavoured to be useful.
Samuel Johnson
#95. I am suggesting that we spend a little less time in idleness, in the fruitless pursuit of watching inane and empty television programs. Time so utilized can be put to better advantage, and the consequences will be wonderful.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#96. Thoughts without their fulfillment - is the beginning of idleness.
Sunday Adelaja
#97. The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books.
Robertson Davies
#98. The mind never sleeps. Though the body can be idle, there shall always be something for the mind to do! Do something with your mind then!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#99. The state, by relieving idleness, improvidence, or misconduct from punishment, and depriving abstinence and foresight of the reward, which have been provided for them by nature, may indeed destroy wealth, but most certainly will aggravate poverty.
Nassau William Senior
#100. We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary.
Agatha Christie
