Top 100 Quotes About Idleness
#1. His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.
Iain Pears
#2. This, to a busy mind like his, was a truly deplorable situation; and had he not been a man of inflexible morals and regular habits, there would have been great danger of his taking to politics or drinking - both which pernicious vices we daily see men driven to by mere spleen and idleness.
Washington Irving
#4. From its very inaction, idleness ultimately becomes the most active cause of evil; as a palsy is more to be dreaded than a fever. The Turks have a proverb which says that the devil tempts all other men, but that idle men tempt the devil.
Charles Caleb Colton
#5. This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
Henry David Thoreau
#6. There are only two sources of human vice - idleness and superstition, and only two virtues - activity and intelligence.
Leo Tolstoy
#7. Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
Gustave Flaubert
#8. They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us.
Horace
#9. 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
#12. It is rather hard to be accused of shiftlessness and idleness when the accuser closes the avenue of labour and industrial pursuits to us.
George H. White
#13. And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
Mary Oliver
#14. Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless.
Hosea Ballou
#15. We simply do not value rest. Busyness is lauded, and idleness is of the Devil.
Andrew Gilmore
#16. All his [Laurent's] great powerful body wanted was to do nothing, to wallow in never-ending idleness and self-indulgence. He would have liked to eat well, sleep well, satisfy his passions liberally, without stirring from one spot or risking the misfortune of a bit of fatigue.
Emile Zola
#17. Prefer diligence before idleness, unless you esteem rust above brightness.
Plato
#18. A wise woman invests her time and doesn't squander it in gossip, judgment or idleness. She knows every moment gone is one that she will not get back.
Toni Sorenson
#19. Sadly, many in our world today encourage idleness, especially in the form of mindless, inane entertainment that is on the Internet, on television, and in computer games.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#20. Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness.
Kamel Daoud
#21. The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
Vladimir Nabokov
#22. Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom.
Omar Khayyam
#23. Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
#24. We are overdone with banking institutions, which have banished the precious metals, and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium ... These have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness ... These are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.
Thomas Jefferson
#25. He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.
John Keats
#27. Through faith we are restored to paradise and created anew. We have no need of works in order to be righteous; however, in order to avoid idleness and so that the body might be cared for an disciplined, works are done freely to please God.
Martin Luther
#28. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.
Leo Tolstoy
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. Her father had once said that the poor might suffer poverty, but the rich had to contend with uselessness, and there was nothing like idleness to eat away at a person's soul.
Kate Morton
#35. I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
Lawrence Durrell
#36. Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
Cesare Pavese
#37. He lacks much who has no aptitude for idleness.
Louise Wilder
#38. such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class - the military.
Leo Tolstoy
#39. In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.
Lydia Sigourney
#40. And gradually his face assumed the expressions which are so often found among rich people - the expressions of discontent, of sickliness, of displeasure, of idleness, of lovelessness. Slowly the soul sickness of the rich crept over him.
Hermann Hesse
#41. Idleness and constancy fix the mind to what it finds easy and agreeable. This habit always confines and cramps up our knowledge; and no one has ever taken the trouble to stretch and carry his understanding as far as it could go.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#42. His Majesty has done absolutely nothing but waste his time darling around eating sweets, contributing to the boy's adolescent chubiness, and to the sense of the country's political drift. Rather than being encouraged to govern, the Shah's courtiers preferred to encourage him in his idleness.
Charles Emmerson
#43. Idleness would have seemed not only a sign of moral decay, but an affront to the natural order of things.
Diana Gabaldon
#44. Busy idleness urges us on.
[Lat., Strenua nos exercet inertia.]
Horace
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.
H.W. Brands
#49. Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profit others and ourselves.
Anne Baxter
#50. Love is born of idleness and, once born, by idleness is fostered.
Ovid
#51. To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
Herman Melville
#52. Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; and the knowledge we acquire by it only a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
#53. 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
#54. Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work.
Frederick Herzberg
#55. Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
#56. The vices of idleness are only to be shaken off by active employment.
Seneca The Younger
#57. I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.
Saul Bellow
#58. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.
Henry David Thoreau
#59. Give me to live with Love alone And let the world go dine and dress; For Love hath lowly haunts ... If life's a flower, I choose my own 'T is "love in Idleness".
Samuel Laman Blanchard
#61. You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.
John Fowles
#62. The principle trap that the devil sets for young people is idleness.
John Bosco
#63. 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
#64. Idleness and complacency lead to mediocrity.
Kim Holden
#65. Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man's mind, under the general head of liberty.
Maria Edgeworth
#67. Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
#68. So long as idleness is quite shut out from our lives, all the sins of wantonness, softness, and effeminacy are prevented; and there is but little room for temptation.
Jeremy Taylor
#69. I should like to know for what reason idleness is so popular with many young people that it is impossible to dissuade them from it either by words or by chastisements.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
#70. One great cause of the vanity, extravagance and idleness that are so fast growing upon our young ladies, is the absence of domestic education.
Lydia Maria Francis Child
#71. Idleness or boredom has no place in the life of a Christian.
Pope Paul VI
#72. Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work,
Mason Currey
#73. It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play - the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life - its facility, its use.
William H Gass
#74. Shun idleness. It is rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
Voltaire
#75. 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
#76. The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
Paul Valery
#77. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#79. The moment you start to lose focus, confidence and determination towards the things you desire to achieve in life. The whole thing reveals your hidden bone idleness.
Euginia Herlihy
#80. Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
Herman Melville
#82. Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time more completely and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever
Edmund Burke
#83. I never remember feeling tired by work. though idleness exhausts me completely.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. I cannot estimate how much this pleases me. I feel I have succeeded to the idleness of God.
William H Gass
#87. As brightness is to rustiness, so labor excelleth idleness.
Thales
#88. Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound, And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
William Shakespeare
#89. Idleness was so often despised. And yet it was on idleness, she knew, that one touched meaning and peace.
Mary Balogh
#90. I was never comfortable with the risk of climbing in the Himalayas, or the amount of time in idleness that is involved in the Everest expedition.
Steve Fossett
#91. Their types were familiar enough to Ralph, who had taken their measure in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene of continental idleness.
Edith Wharton
#92. Time is one thing that can never be retrieved. One may lose and regain friends. One may lose and regain money. Opportunity, once spurned, may come again. But the hours that are lost in idleness can never be brought back to be used in gainful pursuits
Winston Churchill
#93. Wasting time is negative, but there is something positive about idleness.
Russell Lynes
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. He that never labors may know the pains of idleness, but not the pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
#99. Because of laziness the building decays, And through idleness of hands the house leaks.
Anonymous
#100. I think the man who eats the bread of idleness is under a certain obligation to speak well of labor.
Robert Green Ingersoll
