Quotes about idleness

It’s two things you either choose to take risks through storms and win after the hail or you remain idle and die idle. Once laziness is deliberate failure is not an accident!

Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.

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

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

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet t

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

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.

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

My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one's power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.

If you think of something, do it.Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.

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

Nobody does nothing. Everybody does something, sometimes nothing is something in the idle man's world.

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

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.

ur be the things I am wiser to know:Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.Four be the things I'd been better without:Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.Three be the things I shall never attain:Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.Three be the things I shall have till I die:Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

Joblessness does not necessarily mean idleness

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.

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.

A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.

If your passion does not keep you sleepless, you can't be a good beginner. When passion itches, a great hand scratches... Wake up, it's your time to rise above idleness!

I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.

My freshness is spending its wavering shower in the dust.

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.

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 som

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

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.

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.

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.

According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action.

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

An idle genius is an oxymoron.

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

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.

Idleness is a form of passivity in an active universe.

Alexandra, my eldest, here, plays the piano, or reads or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (but never finishes any); and Aglaya sits and does nothing. I don't work too much, either.

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 disast

If [a man] spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will b

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.

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

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.

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.

Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.

A physician can sometimes bury the scythe of death but he has no power over the sand in the hourglass.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

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.

It is no rest to be idle.

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

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

Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.

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.

The hardest work is to go idle.

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

Idleness like kisses to be sweet must be stolen.

With enough 'ifs' we could put Paris into a bottle.

We are lazier in our minds than in our bodies.

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 idle that might be better employed.

Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.

Even if a farmer intends to loaf he gets up in time to get an early start.

Did nothing in particular and did it very well.

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

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

Some people have a perfect genius for doing nothing and doing it assiduously.

Idleness is the holiday of fools.

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

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

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!

True blessing comes in the dress of sweats, never delaying to wave bye to the excuses and procrastination. True blessing lies in hard work!

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!

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

There are two types of patience. One is exercised in hard work and the other in idleness. Patience with hard work is the one that moves mountains. Patience in idleness moves nothing, not even cobwebs.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.