Quotes About Idleness

Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing, he said. All people are good except those who are idle.

There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing.

I had this vague idea that I could be completely happy as an idler, even a beggar, around the water.

Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind.

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.

Military life in general depraves men. It places them in conditions of complete idleness, that is, absence of all rational and useful work; frees them from their common human duties, which it replaces by merely conventional duties to the honor of the regiment, the uniform, the flag; and while giving them on the one hand absolute power over other men, also puts them into conditions of servile obedience to those of higher ranks than themselves.

The Bible legend tells us that the absence of toil - idleness - was a condition of the first man's state of bliss before the Fall. This love of idleness has remained the same in the fallen man, but the curse still lies heavy on the human race....because our moral nature is such that we are unable to be idle and at peace. p 590

there are only two sources of human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity and intelligence.

Constant idleness should be included in the tortures of hell, but it is, on the contrary, considered to be one of the joys of paradise.

To Konstantin Levin the country was good first because it afforded a field for labor, of the usefulness of which there could be no doubt. To Sergey Ivanovitch the country was particularly good, because there it was possible and fitting to do nothing.

He used to say that there were only two sources of human vice: idleness and superstition; and that there were only two virtues: activity and intelligence.

man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive blessedness.

find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class- the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

Bleeding, idleness and mist, he murmured in an unusual mood of poetry. It's like life, isn't it... First the wound, then the resting, and then the uncertainty of it all.

Count Tolstoy preached inaction. It seems he had no need. We "inact" remarkably. Idleness, just that idleness Tolstoy dreamed of, a free, conscious idling that despises labour, this is one of the chief characteristics of our time.

Human beings are the laziest creatures in the history of creation. We would rather not do anything if we could avoid it.

I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.

What would be really difficult is to be sitting on a beach. There's vacations, and there's vegetations. I don't do well vegetating.

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.

Gambling is only the resource of those who do not know what to do with themselves

The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts,... ...but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject.

Sé que hay que ocupar a los niños en algo y que la ociosidad es para ellos el peligro más temible. ¿

You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long.

Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more.