Doing Nothing Quotes - Page 12

• By doing nothing we learne to do ill.

  George Herbert

  Ill

  George Herbert (1874). “The Complete Works of George Herbert: Prose”, p.352

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• There is but one way I know of conversing safely with all men; that is, not by concealing what we say or do, but by saying or doing nothing that deserves to be concealed.

  Alexander Pope

  Men, Way, Candor

  Alexander Pope, Alexander Dyce (1831). “The poetical works of Alexander Pope”

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• Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.

  Doris Lessing

  Reading, Thinking, Bed

  Doris Lessing (2010). “Stories”, p.435, Vintage

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• Most automobiles spend about 80 percent of their time sitting around doing nothing. They're gasoline powered; they go to very high speeds, which in fact, under urban conditions, you don't need. These high speeds generate enormous safety requirements and so on and so forth. Now you can incrementally tweak the automobile. You can make the power train more efficient and you can enhance safety and all of these sorts of things that are very worthwhile.

  William J. Mitchell

  Safety, Needs, Sitting

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness, if you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. ... their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Real, Rigor Mortis, Waiting Rooms

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

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• Pray inwardly, even if you do not enjoy it. It does good, though you feel nothing. Yes, even though you think you are doing nothing.

  Julian of Norwich

  Prayer, Thinking, Doe

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• I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.

  Beth Henley

  Mother, Phones, Talking

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• It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.

  Brad Warner

  Looks, May, Exposing

  Brad Warner (2010). “Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma”, p.87, New World Library

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• Is there anything so wretched as to look at a man of fine abilities doing nothing?

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Men, Looks, Fine

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• But it's also true that my memory is a card shark, reshuffling the deck to hide what I fear to know, unable to keep from fingering the ace at the bottom of the deck even when I'm doing nothing more than playing Fish in the daylight with children.

  Lorene Cary

  Memories, Children, Sharks

  Lorene Cary (2010). “Black Ice”, p.127, Vintage

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• The American people want jobs and economic growth. Congress is doing nothing to provide that. The American people want their constitutional liberties protected. Congress is doing nothing to provide that.

  Ted Cruz

  Jobs, People, Growth

  "Sen. Cruz: IMF provision shouldn't have been in Ukraine bill". "Your World" with Neil Cavuto, www.foxnews.com. March 25, 2014.

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• Holidays are also an opportunity for kids to unlearn every good habit they've learned during the rest of the year. They don't go to school. They get to stay up past their bedtime. They get candy and presents for doing nothing. Childhood utopia.

  Jim Gaffigan

  School, Holiday, Kids

  Jim Gaffigan (2013). “Dad Is Fat”, p.222, Crown Archetype

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• If I was a complete slacker who was just doing nothing but traveling, I don't know if I would have the discipline to be productive and create this job, and on the other hand, if I was always disciplined and productive, I don't think I would have that mystical connection that lead to great work.

  Karan Bajaj

  Jobs, Thinking, Hands

  Source: www.edgemagazine.net

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• blackmail. The age-old path to the land of milk and honey. The one sure way of being paid for doing nothing.

  Ursula Curtiss

  Milk And Honey, Land, Age

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• I love working. I feel guilty about doing nothing; I get bored.

  Nick Frost

  Bored, Guilty, Feels

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• It will take hard work, but doing nothing on Social Security, for example, simply makes sure the system will go broke. It's time to make some reforms.

  Joni Ernst

  Hard Work, Example, Reform

  Source: hotair.com

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• If you want freedom you have to come to terms with being okay in the now doing nothing.

  Doug Duncan

  Want, Term, Okay

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• Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

  Lionel Shriver

  Winter, Waiting, House

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• We expect forty-year-olds to have grown up at some point, and to be engaged and adult and take responsibility, and doing nothing would seem to go against that.

  Noah Baumbach

  Responsibility, Years, Adults

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• Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Leadership, Men, Blow

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• We are here lounging our time away, doing nothing, and having nothing to do. It gives me great regret to be passing my time so uselessly when it could have been so importantly employed at home.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Regret, Home, Giving

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• Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing
  with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring
  with replacing the noun. It is doing that always
  doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that.
  Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and
  pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is
  what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no
  matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a
  great many kinds of poetry.

  Gertrude Stein

  Poetry, Doe, Nouns

  Gertrude Stein (1998). “Writings, 1903-1932: Q.E.D., Three lives, Portraits and other short works, The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”

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• ... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.

  Hannah Arendt

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Action

  Hannah Arendt (1978). “Willing”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• It went beyond idealism and that ridiculous term "activism," which basically means talking about something but doing nothing. . . . We made giving exciting.

  Bob Geldof

  Mean, Talking, Giving

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• Most baby books also tend to romanticize the mother who stays at home, as if she really spends her entire day doing nothing but beaming at the baby and whipping up educational toys from pieces of string, rather than balancing cooing time with laundry, cleaning, shopping and cooking.

  Susan Chira

  Mother, Baby, Educational

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