Top 100 Quotes About Indolence
#1. It is notorious that, whenever the demand for labor is much greater than the supply, or the wages of labor are much higher than the expenses of living, very many, even on the ordinary laboring class, are remarkable for indolence, and work no more than compelled by necessity.
Edmund Ruffin
#2. Eating constitutes the greatest obstacle to self-control; it gives rise to indolence.
Mahavira
#6. It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
W. H. Auden
#7. Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle; for the calamities of life, like the necessities of Nature, are calls to labor and diligence.
Samuel Johnson
#8. There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
Henry Ward Beecher
#9. Indolence is sweet, and its consequence bitter.
Voltaire
#10. Time was, I shrank from what was right, From fear of what was wrong; I would not brave the sacred fight, Because the foe was strong. But now I cast that finer sense And sorer shame aside; Such dread of sin was indolence, Such aim at heaven was pride. J. H. NEWMAN.
Mary W. Tileston
#11. Indolence is heaven 's ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.
Herman Melville
#12. There is a case, and a strong case, for that particular form of indolence that allows us to move through life knowing only what immediately concerns us.
Alec Waugh
#14. Guessing is a weakness brought on by indolence and should never be confused with intuition.
Laurie R. King
#15. Indolence is the dry rot of even a good mind and a good character; the practical uselessness of both. It is the waste of what might be a happy and useful life.
Tryon Edwards
#16. Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, 'On the Knowledge of Character' (1822)
Alan Bennett
#17. Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
H.G.Wells
#18. In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.
James Hutton
#19. Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will. You know that as well as I. In this case it was an indolence characterized by a pursuit of knowledge, a frenzied search for answers to everything, no matter the value of such answers.
Steven Erikson
#20. The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.
John Mason Brown
#21. Not indolence but congenial work is man's Divinely allotted portion.
Joseph Hertz
#22. Ill-humour resembles indolence: it is
natural to us; but if once we have courage to exert ourselves, we find our work run fresh from our hands, and we experience in the activity from which we shrank a real enjoyment.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#23. Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.
John Osborne
#24. I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.
Bernard Williams
#25. They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams.
James Salter
#26. Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy.
Alexander MacLaren
#27. Seeming contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level.
John Stuart Mill
#28. The picture of helpless indolence she calls herself
sublimely helpless and impotent
I had done living I thought
Was ever life so like death before? My face was so close against the tombstones,
that there seemed no room for tears.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#30. It is through madness that we hate an enemy, and think of revenging ourselves; and it is through indolence that we are appeased, and do not revenge ourselves.
Jean De La Bruyere
#31. It is not error which opposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, every thing which favors inaction.
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot
#32. Other men have acquired fame by industry, but this man by indolence.
Tacitus
#33. Europe is in an economic crisis. Germany is the wealthiest country in Europe and it benefits the most from Europe. However, the German public doesn't want to pay for what they see as Greek indolence and corruption.
George Friedman
#34. Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence,
Jon Meacham
#35. It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
Tom Stoppard
#36. One of the great tragedies we witness almost daily is the tragedy of men of high aim and low achievement. Their motives are noble. Their proclaimed ambition is praiseworthy. Their capacity to achieve is great. But their discipline is weak. They succumb to indolence. Appetite robs them of will.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#37. You surprise me, Hastings. Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated than they are were it not for constitutional indolence?
Agatha Christie
#39. Discourtesy does not spring merely from one bad quality, but from several
from foolish vanity, from ignorance of what is due to others, from indolence, from stupidity, from distraction of thought, from contempt of others, from jealousy.
Jean De La Bruyere
#40. More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all--in order to become the public: that abstract whole formed in the most ludicrous way, by all participants becoming a third party (an onlooker).
Soren Kierkegaard
#41. The most dangerous temptations are not due to the active, sudden flames of desire, 'the lusts of the flesh,' but to the disinclinations of the flesh, its indolence and sluggishness, our tendency to become creatures of habit.
Sigrid Undset
#43. Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
Plato
#44. Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.
Honore De Balzac
#45. Injustice arises either from precipitation, or indolence, or from a mixture of both. - The rapid and slow are seldom just; the unjust wait either not at all, or wait too long.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#46. Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. There is no moment like the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards: they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence.
Maria Edgeworth
#48. Employment, which Galen calls 'Nature's Physician,' is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.
Robert A. Burton
#50. 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
#52. Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.
Jean Cocteau
#53. I fear not," Hamilcar said gravely, shaking his head. "It seems to be the fate of all nations, that as they grow in wealth so they lose their manly virtues. With wealth comes corruption, indolence, a reluctance to make sacrifices, and a weakening of the feeling of patriotism.
G.A. Henty
#54. Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence ... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
Jean Cocteau
#55. One can be deceived by three types of laziness: of indolence, which is the wish to procrastinate; the laziness of inferiority, which is doubting your capabilities; and the laziness that is attachment to negative actions, or putting great effort into non-virtue.
Dalai Lama
#56. abundance proffered too soon led to lassitude and indolence, a wandering dissatisfaction.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
#57. Why is it a man can never seem to buckle down and train himself to indolence and stupidity when he can see what sanctuary they offer from toil and pain?
Alan LeMay
#59. Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life is a happy one.
John Ruskin
#60. The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe.
Milan Kundera
#61. To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.
Edward Gibbon
#62. If the mind is wearied by study, or the body worn with sickness,It is well to lie fallow for a while, in the vacancy of sheer amusement ;But when thou prosprest in health, and thine intellect can soar untired,To seek uninstructive pleasure is to slumber on the couch of indolence.
Martin Farquhar Tupper
#63. Mental indolence is one of the commonest of human traits
Anonymous
#64. As an architect, I always have mixed feelings. On the one hand, your fingers are itching. As a human being, you are happy to participate in the indolence.
Rem Koolhaas
#65. Venerate four characters: the sanguine who has checked volatility and the rage for pleasure; the choleric who has subdued passion and pride; the phlegmatic emerged from indolence; and the melancholy who has dismissed avarice, suspicion and asperity.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#66. When leisure is a selfish luxury, its very activity, when it stirs, is apt to be only a kind of indolence taking exercise, that it may the better digest its selfishness.
Henry Ward Beecher
#67. I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate indolence, oppression, injustice; hate Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them with a deep, living, godlike hatred.
Frederick William Robertson
#68. What is public opinion? It is private indolence.
Georg Brandes
#69. They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.
Henry Ward Beecher
#70. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
James Madison
#71. Photography works upon the human eye: what is seen is reflected in the brain without the need for complicated thought. In this way the bourgeoisie takes advantage of the mental indolence of the masses and does good business as well.
Willi Munzenberg
#72. When you and I are inclined to nestle down in indolence and self indulgence. God "stirs up our nests" and bids us fly upward.
Theodore L. Cuyler
#73. I have not drawn a very rosy picture of the magician. I did not intend to do so. To the novice entering the life and promising himself ease, indolence, and wealth, I should say, Don't!
Alexander Herrmann
#74. Flee sloth; for the indolence of the soul is the decay of the body.
Cato The Younger
#75. You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
Voltaire
#76. Achievement of any kind is the crown of effort,the diadem of thought.By the aid of self-control, resolution, purity, righteousness, and well-directed thought a man ascends.By the aid of animality,indolence,impurity,corruption,and confusion of thought a man descends.
James Allen
#77. I suppose that there is no point wasting time being lazy, though of course indolence in a divine way, actually has its advantages.
Stephen Fry
#78. Clemency, which we make a virtue of, proceeds sometimes from vanity, sometimes from indolence, often from fear, and almost always from a mixture of all three.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#79. I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.
Grace Paley
#80. The Lord has not redeemed you so you might enjoy pleasures and luxuries or so that you might abandon yourself to ease and indolence, but rather so you should be prepared to endure all sorts of evils.
John Calvin
#81. Our abode in this world is transitory, our life therein is but a loan, our breaths are numbered and our indolence is manifest.
Abu Bakr
#82. 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
#83. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation ... .Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.
Helen DeWitt
#84. Indolence is the worst enemy that the church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar, stretching themselves on beds of ease, or sit idly with folded hands looking lazily out on fields white for the harvest, but where no sickle rings against the wheat.
Frederic Dan Huntington
#85. I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive.
Lord Chesterfield
#86. My mind changes often ... People who have no mind can easily be steadfast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
Mark Twain
#87. Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.
Tom Hodgkinson
#88. Illiteracy and stupidity are not quite different statuses; they are both the outcome of our lethargy and indolence.
M.F. Moonzajer
#89. Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
Edward Abbey
#90. It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology.
David Riesman
#91. Indolence had a great part in his temperament; a book, a sunny corner, and entire tranquillity, formed his ideal of supportable existence.
George Gissing
#92. Indulged habits of dependence create habits of indolence, and indolence opens the portal to petty errors, to many degrading habits, and to vice and crime with their attendant train of miseries.
Dorothea Dix
#94. Moderation cannot have the credit of combatiug and subduing ambition, they are never found together. Moderation is the languor and indolence of the soul, as ambition is its activity and ardor.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#95. You will sustain your rage, using time as a defense against fear and indolence. In the great stash of defenses, time is the one least imaginative.
Marlena De Blasi
#96. Miracle centered gospel brings about the culture of indolence and insolence upon the country.
Sunday Adelaja
#97. There are two sorts of content; one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence. The first is a virtue; the other, a vice.
Maria Edgeworth
#98. Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than the assumption of the discordance between the former and the existing causes of change.
Charles Lyell
#100. The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.
Soren Kierkegaard
