Top 43 The Idle Man Quotes
#1. Love is the occupation of the idle man, the amusement of a busy one, and the shipwreck of a sovereign.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#3. It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.
Benjamin Franklin
#4. The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest, for he has not earned it.
John Lubbock
#5. Even when someone battles hard, there is an equal portion for one who lingers behind, and in the same honor are held both the coward and the brave man; the idle man and he who has done much meet death alike.
Homer
#6. The idle man is the Devil's cushion, on which he taketh his free ease: who, as he is uncapable of any good, so he is fitly disposed for all evil motions.
Joseph Hall
#8. Nobody does nothing. Everybody does something, sometimes nothing is something in the idle man's world.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#9. Hunger is an altogether fit companion for the idle man.
Hesiod
#10. The idle man stands outside of God's plan, outside of the ordained scheme of things; and the truest self-respect, the noblest independence, and the most genuine dignity, are not to be found there.
J.G. Holland
#11. It is the idle man, not the great worker, who is always complaining that he has no time or opportunity.
Orison Swett Marden
#12. Men are not really born either hopelessly idle, or preternaturally industrious. They may move in one direction or the other as will or circumstances dictate, but it is open to any man to work.
Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook
#13. To procrastinate seems inherent in man, for if you do to-day that you may enjoy to-morrow it is but deferring the enjoyment; so that to be idle or industrious, vicious or virtuous, is but with a view of procrastinating the one or the other.
Benjamin Haydon
#14. Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
G.K. Chesterton
#15. One man by delay restored the state, for he preferred the public safety to idle report.
[Lat., Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem,
Non ponebat enim rumores ante salutem.]
Quintus Ennius
#16. 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
#17. Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love.
Ovid
#18. 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
#19. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#20. The most likely man to go to hell is the man who has nothing to do on earth. Idle people tempt the devil to tempt them.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#21. On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.
Oscar Wilde
#22. Belief fails when it works not well indeed but is idle as a sleeping man ... Each virtuous deed is strong when it is grounded upon the solidity of belief.
John Wycliffe
#23. Denton struck Charley as the kind of man who never wasted energy on extra movement or idle chitchat. He was foursquare Sonny Boy Williamson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Silvertone guitar, older than old school.
Natalie Baszile
#24. Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.
Samuel Johnson
#25. Man's responsibility is correspondingly operative with his free agency. Actions in harmony with divine law and the laws of nature will bring happiness, and those in opposition to divine truth, misery. Man is responsible not only for every deed, but also for every idle word and thought.
David O. McKay
#26. Unless man has the wit and the grit to build his civilization on something better than material power, it is surely idle to talk of plans for a stable peace.
Francis Bowes Sayre, Sr.
#27. But nerves always festered in the stillness of waiting. Left at idle, the mind could make a coward of even the bravest man.
D.J. Molles
#28. Rather do what is nothing to the purpose than be idle; that the devil may find thee doing. The bird that sits is easily shot, when fliers scape the fowler. Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all the virtues, and the self-made sepulchre of a living man.
Francis Quarles
#29. An idle man's brain is the devil's workshop.
John Bunyan
#30. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#31. It is easy for a man who sits idle at home, and has nobody to please but himself, to ridicule or censure the common practices of mankind.
Samuel Johnson
#32. It was presumptuous for one man to forgive another. That was the duty of God. For men to pretend such mercy was an idle pride and a lack of respect. He did not desire any such mercy for himself.
Mario Puzo
#33. No man is so idle that he cannot rouse himself just enough to get in the way of a busy person.
Robert Breault
#34. Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; ...
Jane Austen
#35. When man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.
Voltaire
#36. An idle man has a constant tendency to torpidity. He has adopted the Indian maxim that it is better to walk than to run, and better to stand than to walk, and better to sit than to stand, and better to lie than to sit. He hugs himself into the notion, that God calls him to be quiet.
Richard Cecil
#37. In the world of high finance the shilling of the idle rich man can buy more than that of the poor, industrious man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#38. It is no idle phrase that man was made in God's image. There is something worth saving in the worst of us, and out of this something a new man may be fashioned.
Philip Jose Farmer
#39. The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.
Ludwig Von Mises
#40. The busy man has few idle visitors; to the boiling pot the flies come not.
Benjamin Franklin
#41. The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood, being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson.
Washington Irving
#42. God is asking you to take care of this special place. He says: If a man is lazy, the rafters sag; if his hands are idle, the house leaks (Ecclesiastes 10:18).
Jim George
#43. Were possible for a man to discover a mode of existence in which he could feel that, though idle, he was of use to the world and fulfilling his duty,
Leo Tolstoy
