Quotes and Sayings about Idleness
"Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profit others and ourselves."
- Anne Baxter
(Related: Home, Devil, Duty, Idleness, Labor, Profit, Sin, Temptation)
"Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Women, Idleness, Leisure, Retirement, Sin)
"It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness."
- George Borrow
(Related: Idleness)
"Idleness is an appendix to nobility."
- Robert Burton
(Related: Idleness, Nobility)
"Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness."
- Samuel Butler
(Related: Men, Work, Idleness, Sin)
"Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Idleness, Labor, Writing)
"Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Mother, Goal, Diligence, Fortune, Idleness, Man, Wishes)
"Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable."
- Anton Chekhov
(Related: Happiness, Life, Idleness)
"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today."
- Lord Chesterfield
(Related: Time, Idleness, Laziness, Today, Tomorrow, Value)
"Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds."
- Lord Chesterfield
(Related: Idleness)
"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble."
- Agatha Christie
(Related: Mother, Idleness, Invention, Laziness, Necessity, Opinion, Trouble)
"Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette."
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
(Related: Time, Idleness, Light)
"Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company."
- Jeremy Collier
(Related: People, Company, Disorder, Idleness, Nothing)
"Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Idleness, Infinite, Living, Name, Present)
"Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron."
- Ezra Cornell
(Related: Idleness, Mind)
"Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease."
- Benjamin Franklin
(Related: Idleness, Trouble)
"Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace."
- Hesiod
(Related: Work, Disgrace, Idleness)
"Toil is no source of shame; idleness is shame."
- Hesiod
(Related: Idleness, Shame)
"Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Idleness)
"The day has gone by into the dim vista of the past when idleness was considered a virtue in woman."
- Caroline A. Huling
(Related: Virtue, Day, Idleness, Past, Woman)
"Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen."
- Jerome K. Jerome
(Related: Idleness, Kisses)
"To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Care, Idleness, Man, Poor, Poverty)
"Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value."
- Benjamin Jowett
(Related: Idleness, Results, Value, Will)
"Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues."
- Franz Kafka
(Related: Beginning, Idleness, Vice)
"Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good."
- Soren Kierkegaard
(Related: Being, Evil, Idleness)
"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."
- John Lubbock
(Related: Time, Lie, Clouds, Day, Idleness, Listening, Rest, Sky, Summer, Trees, Waste, Water)
"It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., which are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature."
- Lord Melbourne
(Related: Love, Nature, Faults, Idleness, Man, Neglect, Pleasure, Pursuit, Wounds)
"Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness."
- Herman Melville
(Related: Grief, Idleness, Man, Sin)
"Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper."
- Hannah More
(Related: Men, Children, Evil, Idleness, Temper)
"Idleness is the parent of psychology."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Idleness, Psychology)
"Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish."
- Francois Rabelais
(Related: Idleness, World)
"I wonder at the idleness of tears."
- Lizette Woodworth Reese
(Related: Idleness, Tears, Wonder)
"Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
(Related: Women, Life, People, Danger, Idleness, Man, Reading, Solitude)
"Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind."
- Johann G. Seume
(Related: Body, Idleness, Mind, Stupidity)
"It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where people don't care to do anything, they shelter themselves under a permission that it cannot be done."
- Bishop Robert South
(Related: People, Care, Idleness)
"It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually."
- Anthony Trollope
(Related: Idleness, Luxury, Man)
"We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency."
- Eamon de Valera
(Related: Idleness, Inefficiency, Waste)
"Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell."
- Beatrice Potter Webb
(Related: Work, Hell, Idleness)
"It is rather hard to be accused of shiftlessness and idleness when the accuser closes the avenue of labour and industrial pursuits to us."
- George H. White
(Related: Idleness)
"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Dreams, Truth, Idleness)
"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Dreams, Truth, Idleness)
"Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness."
- William Wordsworth
(Related: Day, Golf, Idleness)