Idleness Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Idleness

Idleness Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Idleness quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

As brightness is to rustiness, so labor excelleth idleness. — Thales

Idleness and complacency lead to mediocrity. — Kim Holden

The principle trap that the devil sets for young people is idleness. — John Bosco

Idleness is only the refuge of weak
minds, and the holiday of fools. — Philip Dormer Stanhope

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea. — Mary Oliver

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way. — Virginia Woolf

Joblessness does not necessarily mean idleness — Sunday Adelaja

No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive. — Abraham Lincoln

An idle genius is an oxymoron. — James Thornton

Poverty is not dishonorable in itself, but only when it comes from idleness, intemperance, extravagance, and folly. — Plutarch

Idleness is the key of beggary. — Charles Spurgeon

We strike fatal blows to idleness with our productivity. — Sunday Adelaja

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present. — Cyril Connolly

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth. — Oscar Wilde

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical. — Thomas Jefferson

It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy. — Tim Winton

I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural. — Lawrence Durrell

Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness. — William Ralph Inge

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness. — Samuel Butler

Enjoyment stops where indolence begins. — Robert Pollok

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart. — Gustave Flaubert

In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasure — George Eliot

Idleness is seductive.
Just relax and do nothing, it says. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep. — John Keats

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

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach. — Oscar Wilde

Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing. — H.W. Brands

Shun idleness. It is rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals. — Voltaire

He mingled idleness and idealism so that he could not separate them. — W. Somerset Maugham

We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency. — Eamon De Valera

The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness. — Leo Tolstoy

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron. — Ezra Cornell

Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace. — Hesiod

Prefer diligence before idleness, unless you esteem rust above brightness. — Plato

Trouble Springs From Idleness. — Benjamin Franklin

It's heartbreaking to see so many people trapped in a web of enforced idleness, deep debt, and gnawing self-doubt. — William J. Clinton

True blessing comes in the dress of sweats, never delaying to wave bye to the excuses and procrastination. True blessing lies in hard work! — Israelmore Ayivor

Idleness leads to insolence. — Matshona Dhliwayo

To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil. — Herman Melville

Spirituality for the most part is a mask worn by idleness, arrogance and greed. — Robert Green Ingersoll

He that never labors may know the pains of idleness, but not the pleasures. — Samuel Johnson

Gossip, like ennui, is born of idleness. — Ninon De L'Enclos

Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value. — Benjamin Jowett

Idleness makes people feeble and peevish. Work makes them stalwart and prone to anger. — Mason Cooley

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

Communism is the flower of idleness. — George Ticknor

Idleness was so often despised. And yet it was on idleness, she knew, that one touched meaning and peace. — Mary Balogh

The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices — Paul Valery

Nobody does nothing. Everybody does something, sometimes nothing is something in the idle man's world. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness. — Ambrose Bierce

Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work, — Mason Currey

What heart can think, or tongue express, The harm that groweth of idleness? — John Heywood

Because of laziness the building decays, And through idleness of hands the house leaks. — Anonymous

We may regard certain days as free days. Free days are however fee days. We will pay later — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I was never comfortable with the risk of climbing in the Himalayas, or the amount of time in idleness that is involved in the Everest expedition. — Steve Fossett

Busy mouths grow on idle heads — Agona Apell

Idleness is paralysis. — Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor. — Mark Twain

Idleness or boredom has no place in the life of a Christian. — Pope Paul VI

Remove the temptation of idleness and Cupid's bow is useless. — Ovid

Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it. — Tom Hodgkinson

Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel. — John Quincy Adams

Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless. — Hosea Ballou

I never remember feeling tired by work. though idleness exhausts me completely. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues. — Franz Kafka

Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and governments. — Benjamin Franklin

Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind. — Johann G. Seume

Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous. — Charles Baudelaire

Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell. — Beatrice Webb

There is no curse equal to the curse of idleness. It destroys the man, the group, the people, or the nation who suffer under it. — J. Reuben Clark

It is idleness that is the curse of man - not labour. Idleness eats the heart out of men as of nations, and consumes them as rust does iron. — Samuel Smiles

Fear is nothing but idleness of the will ... — Eliphas Levi

Gluttony and idleness are two of life's great joys, but they are not honourable. — Julie Burchill

Idleness and luxury are the devil's jackals, and find him abundant prey. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

For Kim did nothing with an immense success. — Rudyard Kipling

It was in idleness that one came face-to-face with the I AM. With simple, elemental Being. — Mary Balogh

In work there is no shame; shame is in the idleness. — Hesiod

A Dandy does nothing. — Charles Baudelaire

Wasting time is negative, but there is something positive about idleness. — Russell Lynes

There are only two sources of human vice - idleness and superstition, and only two virtues - activity and intelligence. — Leo Tolstoy

Till I see money spent on the betterment of man instead of on his idleness and destruction, I shall not believe in any perfect form of government ... — Margot Asquith

Toil is no source of shame; idleness is shame. — Hesiod

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice. — Samuel Smiles

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything. — Floyd Dell

I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Idleness does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formualries of the ruling class. — Robert Louis Stevenson

A soldier's time is passed in distress and danger, or in idleness and corruption. — Samuel Johnson

Books were considered a sign of idleness at best and dangerous at worst. — James Rebanks

I didn't want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank. — Sara Sheridan

Grief is a species of idleness. — Samuel Johnson

Machinery which is not used is not capital. — Karl Marx

Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now. — Anthony Burgess

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

There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business. — Samuel Johnson

We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary. — Agatha Christie

My freshness is spending its wavering shower in the dust. — Francis Thompson

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. — George MacDonald

According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day. — A.A. Milne

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