Quotation Explorer - 'Idleness'

In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry of idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.
Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no delay, no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. - Lord Chesterfield
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness - the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. - Ann Radcliffe
I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness. - Brenda Ueland
I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy. - Primo Levi
When you are on a time bound purposeful journey, rest is not just idleness but wastefulness. - Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property, and if it were a question of poetry we would likely find that she is the daughter of love. - Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices. - Ambrose Bierce
Idleness and lack of occupation tend - nay are dragged - towards evil. - Hippocrates
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. - Virginia Woolf
Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness; no laziness; no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. - Lord Chesterfield
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. - Jerome K. Jerome
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good. - Soren Kierkegaard
In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe. - Lydia Sigourney
Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. - Jerome K. Jerome
Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. - Robert Louis Stevenson
I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. - Agatha Christie
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of attention, and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied but to be read.
Work is not always required... there is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. - George McDonald
Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it. - Tom Hodgkinson
Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profiteth others and ourselves.
Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.
There are pauses amidst study, and even pauses of seeming idleness, in which a process goes on which may be likened to the digestion of food. In those seasons of repose, the powers are gathering their strength for new efforts; as land which lies fallow recovers itself for tillage.
Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything. - Floyd Dell
Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness. - George MacDonald
I rather would entreat thy companyTo see the wonders of the world abroadThan, living dully sluggardiz'd at home,Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness. - William Shakespeare
In idleness there is a perpetual despair. - Thomas Carlyle
Rather do what is nothing in the purpose than to be idle, that the devil may find thee doing. The bird that sits is easily shot when the fliers escape the fowler. Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all the virtues, and is the self-made sepulcher of a living man. - Francis Quarles
CONVENT, n. A place of retirement for woman who wish for leisure to meditate upon the vice of idleness. - Ambrose Bierce
Grief is a species of idleness. - Samuel Johnson
A wise woman invests her time and doesn’t squander it in gossip, judgment or idleness. She knows every moment gone is one that she will not get back. - Toni Sorenson
I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness . . . - William Shakespeare
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