Idleness Quotes - Page 4

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

  Franz Kafka

  Vices, Crowns, Literature

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron

  Ezra Cornell

  Iron, Mind, Rust

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• Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

  Cyril Connolly

  Names, Literature, Infinite

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

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• There is really nothing left to a genuine idle man, who possesses any considerable degree of vital power, but sin.

  J. G. Holland

  Men, Degrees, Sin

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• 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 Henry Borrow

  Parent, Vacuums, Laziness

  George Henry Borrow (2012). “The Pocket George Borrow”, p.73, tredition

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• Enjoyment stops where indolence begins.

  Robert Pollok

  Indolence, Enjoyment

  Robert Pollok, James Robert Boyd (1860). “Pollok's Course of Time”, p.356

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• For Satan always finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.

  Isaac Watts

  Hands, Laziness, Satan

  Isaac Watts, “How Doth The Little Busy Bee”

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• The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest, for he has not earned it.

  John Lubbock

  Men, Lazy Man, Doe

  John Lubbock (1913). “The Pleasures of the Life”

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

  Samuel Johnson

  Advice, Solitude, Sloth

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (letter to Boswell, 27 Oct. 1779)

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• Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Inspirational, Time, Patriotic

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.86, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Toil is no source of shame; idleness is shame.

  Hesiod

  Toil, Shame, Source

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• How sweet and sacred idleness is!

  Walter Savage Landor

  Sweet, Sacred

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans”, p.272

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• That man is idle who can do something better.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Laziness, Idle

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Life, Dream, Truth

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.583, Wordsworth Editions

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• Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Writing, Labor

  Thomas Carlyle, G. B. Tennyson (1984). “Carlyle Reader”, p.16, CUP Archive

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• 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.

  William Shakespeare

  Home, Sloth, World

  William Shakespeare (1873). “Shakespeare's Comedy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona”, p.3

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• 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

  Inspirational, Success, Summer

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• Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time more completely and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever

  Edmund Burke

  Men, Too Much, Masters

  Edmund Burke (1852). “The Works and Correspondence Of...Edmund Burke”, p.77

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• 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.

  J. B. Priestley

  Men, Energy, Fool

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• The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest.

  Albert Einstein

  Life, Work, Heart

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• It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.

  Bryant H. McGill

  Powerful, Intelligence, Literature

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• Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.

  Johann Gottfried Seume

  Stupid, Mind, Body

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• In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Despair, Perpetual

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

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Faults, Excuse

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• 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.

  Blaise Pascal

  Passion, Men, Boredom

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