Quotes About Idleness

It little profits that an idle king,By this still hearth, among these barren crags,Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race.

L'un des maux de cette époque est que l'on ne peut plus demander aux gens ce qu'ils font. Cette question jadis innocente entraîne aujourd'hui un malaise trop profond. Le chômage y est pour beaucoup. Je trouve cela dommage. Si quelqu'un me disait très simplement qu'il ne faisait rien dans la vie, j'aurais pour lui de l'admiration. Il est magnifique de ne rien faire. Si peu de gens en sont capables.

Vous savez, il y a toujours une poignée de désoeuvrés, de végétariens, de critiques novices, d'étudiants masochistes ou encore de curieux qui vont jusqu'à lire les livres qu'ils achètent.

I'm pretty much a couch potato.

I am a couch potato!

The insupportable labor of doing nothing.

Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other's discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.

I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business.

I can think of a lot of things to do, he said, and none of them involve standing up. - Al

Oliver was far from fretting: he was in good bodily health, the bad weather allowed him to remain in idleness, his industry had deserted him.

Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.

The hardest work is to go idle.

To learn to be without desire you must desire that. Better to do as you please: sing idleness. Floating clouds, and water idly running -- Where's their source? In all the vastness of the sea and sky, you'll never find it.

The disgruntled are abundant among those who are idle, and to be idle is a matter of choice.

I know why everyone in a false world would think a boy who spent his whole life doing nothing is God. I just don't know how to give it decent subtitles yet.

Without execution, thinking is mere idleness.

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.

I thought of a line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.

One of the great advantages that we may derive from machinery is the check that it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents.

Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it.

All his [Laurent's] great powerful body wanted was to do nothing, to wallow in never-ending idleness and self-indulgence. He would have liked to eat well, sleep well, satisfy his passions liberally, without stirring from one spot or risking the misfortune of a bit of fatigue.

se reposant de tout un après-midi de flânerie.

I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.