Top 50 Quotes About Idleness Work
#1. Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended ... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored ...
Soren Kierkegaard
#2. Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.
Mark Twain
#3. Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.
Plato
#4. If, in any individual, university training produces a taste for refined idleness, a distaste for sustained effort, a barren intellectual arrogance, or a sense of superfluous aloofness from the world of real men who do the world's real work, then it has harmed that individual.
Theodore Roosevelt
#5. Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.
Thomas Carlyle
#6. The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.
Tom Hodgkinson
#7. Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.
Rose Macaulay
#8. Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work.
Frederick Herzberg
#9. Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work,
Mason Currey
#10. 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
#11. I never remember feeling tired by work. though idleness exhausts me completely.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#12. There is no harvest without hard work, therefore never expect chance to solve your problems of abject need for you. You must take deliberate actions!
Israelmore Ayivor
#13. True blessing comes in the dress of sweats, never delaying to wave bye to the excuses and procrastination. True blessing lies in hard work!
Israelmore Ayivor
#14. A conclusion I've come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it's really about making work into something that isn't drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.
Tom Hodgkinson
#15. Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell.
Beatrice Webb
#16. There is no curse equal to the curse of idleness. It destroys the man, the group, the people, or the nation who suffer under it.
J. Reuben Clark
#17. The idea of passing one's whole life in moral idleness, and having one's hardest work and duty done by another-whether God or man-is most revolting to us, as it is most degrading to human dignity.
H. P. Blavatsky
#18. Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them.
In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.
John N. Gray
#19. Idleness does drive me crazy, but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it.
Karen Allen
#20. It would indeed be a sad misfortune if man were released from the necessity of work and struggle, for it is a well-known fact that organs which do not function atrophy; and according to the old saying, 'Idleness is the devil's workshop.'
Charles A. Beard
#21. I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic - to their often justifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person.
David Graeber
#22. To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.
Samuel Butler
#23. Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
George MacDonald
#24. Alexandra, my eldest, here, plays the piano, or reads or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (but never finishes any); and Aglaya sits and does nothing. I don't work too much, either.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#25. Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
Samuel Butler
#26. I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#27. 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
#28. Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.
George MacDonald
#29. Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.
Hesiod
#30. 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
#31. Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind.
Henry Ford
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.
Abraham Lincoln
#35. No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely." ~ Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
#36. No doubt, having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way.
Marcel Proust
#37. In work there is no shame; shame is in the idleness.
Hesiod
#38. Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.
Benedict Of Nursia
#39. 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
#41. In the matter of piety, poverty serves us better than wealth, and work better than idleness, especially since wealth becomes an obstacle even for those who do not devote themselves to it.
Saint John Chrysostom
#43. The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness.
Henry Ward Beecher
#45. Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#46. Lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired
John Stuart Mill
#47. I know of nothing that is so degenerating and so dangerous as idleness, for the brain will seek out mischief.
Francis M. Lyman
#48. Idleness makes people feeble and peevish. Work makes them stalwart and prone to anger.
Mason Cooley
#49. If I gave my mother a knitted scarf she'd be worried I was wasting my time doing stupid stuff like knitting instead of school work. Presenting a homemade knitted object to my parents was actually like handing them a detailed backlog of my idleness.
Mindy Kaling
#50. Nobody does nothing. Everybody does something, sometimes nothing is something in the idle man's world.
Michael Bassey Johnson
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