Idleness Quotes:
Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
Anton Chekhov
Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
The invention of money opened a new field to human avarice by giving rise to usury and the practice of lending money at interest while the owner passes a life of idleness.
Pliny the Elder
I think the man who eats the bread of idleness is under a certain obligation to speak well of labor.
Robert Green Ingersoll
To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.
Samuel Johnson
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
Soren Kierkegaard
Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.
Victor Hugo
Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
William Wordsworth
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
Convent – a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.
Ambrose Bierce
Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
Benjamin Franklin
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
Franz Kafka
Idleness is the parent of psychology.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
Samuel Butler
Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
Herman Melville
Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.
Miguel de Cervantes
Believe me, I do not like idleness but work.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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.
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
Sadly, many in our world today encourage idleness, especially in the form of mindless, inane entertainment that is on the Internet, on television, and in computer games.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
Idleness – a job that you have to go to, but not necessarily do anything – is the poet’s friend.
John Cooper Clarke
Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.
Benjamin Jowett
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.
Anthony Trollope
When economist William Beveridge dreamed up the postwar welfare state he wanted to fight five ‘giant evils’ – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Fast forward 65 years and it seems the last New Labour government grew an Unfair State that fuelled – not fought – one of those evils: idleness.
Jeremy Kyle
We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency.
Eamon de Valera
Gluttony and idleness are two of life’s great joys, but they are not honourable.
Julie Burchill
Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.
Johann G. Seume
Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.
Hannah More
Idleness does drive me crazy, but I’d rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it.
Karen Allen
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.
George Borrow
There was a phase when I would just loaf around, doing nothing. It had put my mom under a lot of stress. I knew her stress stemmed from her love for me, yet I never paid attention to her feelings. When it finally hit me that my idleness was taking a toll on her, I was genuinely sad and depressed.
Farhan Akhtar
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
Idleness is an appendix to nobility.
Robert Burton
Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
Acting is a lot of waiting to be picked, and I like to do a lot of things at once. I think I will have to find things that are totally mine. I have so much comfort that school and my academic life are totally mine. I hope that there’s not a lot of idleness in my future.
Sarah Steele
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 profit others and ourselves.
Anne Baxter
It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., which are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature.
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.
Jeremy Collier
It is rather hard to be accused of shiftlessness and idleness when the accuser closes the avenue of labour and industrial pursuits to us.
George H. White
Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.
Hesiod
I’m not a fan of idleness, except in small doses.
Tim Ferriss
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
The regime in too many prisons is one of idleness, and locking up someone from such a background in idleness virtually guarantees re-offending. Instead there needs to be a full day’s work every weekday in either the workshops or the education department or preferably a mixture of both.
Ann Widdecombe
It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where people don’t care to do anything, they shelter themselves under a permission that it cannot be done.
Robert South
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
Idleness of the mind is much worse than that of the body: wit, without employment, is a disease – the rust of the soul, a plague, a hell itself.
Samuel Smiles
A few days of idleness have completely sickened me, and given me what is called the blue-devils so severely, that I feel that the sooner I go to work and drive them off, the better.
John James Audubon
Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish.
Francois Rabelais
Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.
Jerome K. Jerome
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
John Lubbock
It would indeed be a sad misfortune if man were released from the necessity of work and struggle, for it is a well-known fact that organs which do not function atrophy; and according to the old saying, ‘Idleness is the devil’s workshop.’
Charles A. Beard
It’s heartbreaking to see so many people trapped in a web of enforced idleness, deep debt, and gnawing self-doubt.
William J. Clinton
Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.
Ezra Cornell
Toil is no source of shame; idleness is shame.
Hesiod
What is Idleness?
A lack of movement or energy is idleness. Idling means the act of nothing or no work in describing a person or a machine. It’s a man who spends his days doing nothing can be described as “without length of time.