Browsing Topic Best Idleness Quotes

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

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.

Idleness is the enemy of the soul.

Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all things easy.

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.

Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind.

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.

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years’ task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.

The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

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.

Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish.

Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.

It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless.

For Satan always finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.

Gossip, like ennui, is born of idleness.

More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk, beat his wife – and watch TV.

The falsest of all philosophies is that which, under the pretext of delivering men from the embarrassment of their passions, counsels idleness and the abandonment and neglect of themselves.

Ignorance, far more than idleness, is the mother of all the vices; and how recent has been the admission, that knowledge should be the portion of all? The destinies of the future lie in judicious education; an education that must be universal, to be beneficial.

If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.

Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.

The program should know if someone is at the keyboard or joystick or if it is just sitting there idle. It should know if someone is proficient in its use or a novice.

A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within.

It can be set down as a broad, general principle that we cannot indulge in idleness and abundance during both the first and second half of our life. Study, application, industry, enthusiasm while we are young usually enable us to enjoy life when we grow older. But unless we toil and strive and earn all we can in the first half, the second half of our life is liable to bring disappointment, discomfort, distress. The time to put forth effort is when we are most able to do it, namely, in the years of our greatest strength. The law of compensation hasn’t ceased to function.

As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property.

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 brainMere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.

Idleness is an enemy of the soul.

In effort Happiness idleness life pleasure superstition support trouble work The superstition that all our hours of work are a minus quantity in the happiness of life, and all the hours of idleness are plus ones, is a most ludicrous and pernicious doctrine, and its greatest support comes from our not taking sufficient trouble, not making a real effort, to make work as near pleasure as it can be.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,–cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

Timing is everything. Tell me how a young man spends his evenings and I will tell you how far he is likely to go in the world. The popular notion is that a youth’s progress depends upon how he acts during his working hours. It doesn’t. It depends far more upon how he utilizes his leisure…If he spends it in harmless idleness, he is likely to be kept on the payroll, but that will be about all. If he diligently utilizes his own time…to fit himself for more responsible duties, then the greater responsibilities – and greater rewards – are almost certain to come to him.

Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes it.

In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we’ve managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase ‘spare time’ has vanished from the land.

Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.