Quotes About Idleness

Grief is a species of idleness.

I've never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don't understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday.

Instead of imitating me, you simply loiter.

The hard part of not working is occupying the mind. If an actor doesn't work, he grows stale.

Just standing around looking beautiful is so boring.

I call that man idle who might be better employed.

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

Idleness is the sepulchre of a living man.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.

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.

The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

Idle men tempt the devil to tempt them.

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

Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.

There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.

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

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.

Dangerous, free time on your hands. You can only jerk off so often.

The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.

What an idle time! What an insubstantial, happy, foolish time!