#Idleness Quotes

“I rather would entreat thy company; To see the wonders of the world abroad, Than, living dully sluggardized at home, Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.”

“The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes.”

“That man is idle who can do something better.”

“And to the English court assemble now, From every region, apes of idleness!”

“Time is one thing that can never be retrieved. One may lose and regain friends. One may lose and regain money. Opportunity, once spurned, may come again. But the hours that are lost in idleness can never be brought back to be used in gainful pursuits”

“The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs, Losing both beauty and utility.”

“The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.”

“My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”

“Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.”

“Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.”

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”

“Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.”

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

“Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the clouds and the rain.”

“An industrious farmer occupies a more dignified place in the scale of beings...than a lazy lounger...too proud to work, and drawing out a miserable existence by eating on that surplus of other men's labor.”

“In a world which furnishes so many employments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui [boredom] is, or if we are ever driven to the miserable resource of gaming, which corrupts our dispositions, and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind.”

“Shun idleness. It is rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.”

“So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.”

“Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.”

“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.”

“I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.”

“Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits-the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.”

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work when there is no definite object of any kind. To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing.”

“Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.”

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing.”

“I call that man idle who might be better employed.”

“Idle man, chases after fairy tales.”

“Hard work is amply the refuge of those who have nothing to do.”

“The bees can abide no drones amongst them; but as soon as they begin to be idle, they kill them.”

“The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.”

“The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.”

“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”

“I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.”

“He rides in the row at ten o clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you?”

“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.”

“We are made weak both by idleness and distrust of ourselves. Unfortunate, indeed, is he who suffers from both. If he is a mere individual he becomes nothing; if he is a king he is lost.”

“But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.”

“Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.”

“Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.”

“And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.”

“I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.”

“Young people ought not to be idle, it is very bad for them.”

“To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.”

“For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.”

“Idleness is the parent of psychology.”

“If I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler.”

“I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous.”

“Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is ? a vice?”

“It is a mighty error to suppose that none but violent and strong passions, such as love and ambition, are able to vanquish the rest. Even idleness, as feeble and languishing as it is, sometimes reigns over them; it usurps the throne and sits paramount over all the designs and actions of our lives, and imperceptibly wastes and destroys all our passions and all our virtues.”

“O Lord! I don't know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.”