Idleness Quotes

There is less leisure now than in the Middle Ages when one third of the year consisted of holidays and festivals.

I rather would entreat thy companyTo see the wonders of the world abroadThan, living dully sluggardiz'd at home,Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

If you could not do much in the month of April with five letters, think of what really you can do with the month of May with three letters before you open the door of the month of June with four letters. Which is the break time for the entire twelve months of the year. Until you clearly understand how you are spending the year, you shall finish spending it and ponder over how you spent it, year after year! No one is absolutely free from excuses and the challenges of life. You just have to do something great with each day in the year!

An idle genius is an oxymoron.

Is idleness indeed so black a crime?What are the Busy doing, half their time?

I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination.

It is no rest to be idle.

They call it "business" because it does not become successful by a person's "idleness". Go get busy if you want to do business; but be busy for the right reasons!

Idleness is the holiday of fools.

He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.

If you wait for the mango fruits to fall, you'd be wasting your time while others are learning how to climb the tree

Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.

I didn’t want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it.

Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.

Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.

I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly

How beautiful it is to do nothing and then rest afterward.

Extreme busyness whether at school or college kirk or market is a symptom of deficient vitality and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.

Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.

Before you are much older...you will have policemen here to stay. A magistrate will be next. Then perhaps even a jail. And the counterparts of those things are hunger and want, and misery and idleness. The night is coming. Watch and pray.

He is idle that might be better employed.

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!

Joblessness does not necessarily mean idleness

In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art from, she became dangerous.

If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble with the rest; and if you can do with a little, ask for a great deal. Because if you don't you won't get any.

We may regard certain days as free days. Free days are however fee days. We will pay later

Then turn your eyes back on me,and tell me that Cathy and I are still children to be treated with condescension, and are incapable of understanding adult subjects. We haven'tremained idle, twiddling our thumbs while you were off having a good time.

So many people die though they live, and it is not as if they don’t have life; they only refuse to keep breathing!

We are lazier in our minds than in our bodies.

Did nothing in particular and did it very well.

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest without passion without business without entertainment without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty insufficient dependent ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom gloom sorrow chagrin resentment and despair.

He is not only idle who does nothing but he is idle who might be better employed.

If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardship of his lot set him to do nothing.

My freshness is spending its wavering shower in the dust.

Ivanov: I am a bad, pathetic and worthless individual. One needs to be pathetic, too, worn out and drained by drink, like Pasha, to be still fond of me and to respect me. My God, how I despise myself! I so deeply loathe my voice, my walk, my hands, these clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't that funny, isn't that shocking? Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, I was cheerful, tireless, passionate, I worked with these very hands, I could speak to move even Philistines to tears, I could cry when I saw grief, I became indignant when I encountered evil. I knew inspiration, I knew the charm and poetry of quiet nights when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or indulge you mind with dreams. I believed, I looked into the future as into the eyes of my own mother... And now, my God, I am exhausted, I do not believe, I spend my days and nights in idleness.

An idle mind is a devil’s workshop and I am prone to renting out my mind to the first bidder.

Boredom is the Devil's delight.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.

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.

Of all our faults the one that we excuse most easily is idleness.

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.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

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.

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.

There is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like you may take me for one of those.

The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.

Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

The hardest work is to go idle.

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.

It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.