Idleness Quotes

ur be the things I am wiser to know:Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.Four be the things I'd been better without:Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.Three be the things I shall never attain:Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.Three be the things I shall have till I die:Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

~ Dorothy Parker

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

~ A.a. Milne

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

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

~ Lawrence Durrell

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

~ Bill Watterson

It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

~ Tim Winton

He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

~ Albert Camus

Is idleness indeed so black a crime?What are the Busy doing, half their time?

~ William Allingham

If you wait for the mango fruits to fall, you'd be wasting your time while others are learning how to climb the tree

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.

~ Iain Pears

The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.

~ Tom Hodgkinson

Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.

~ Tom Hodgkinson

Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.

~ Benedict Of Nursia

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.

~ Samuel Butler

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.

~ Bertrand Russell

I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.

~ Henry David Thoreau

I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly

~ Henry David Thoreau

Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.

~ Criss Jami

An idle mind is a devil’s workshop and I am prone to renting out my mind to the first bidder.

~ Anurag Shourie

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

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

If your passion does not keep you sleepless, you can't be a good beginner. When passion itches, a great hand scratches... Wake up, it's your time to rise above idleness!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Boredom is the Devil's delight.

~ Lindsey Rietzsch

We may regard certain days as free days. Free days are however fee days. We will pay later

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Then turn your eyes back on me,and tell me that Cathy and I are still children to be treated with condescension, and are incapable of understanding adult subjects. We haven'tremained idle, twiddling our thumbs while you were off having a good time.

~ V.c. Andrews

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

~ Tom Hodgkinson

Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.

~ Tom Hodgkinson

A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.

~ Tom Hodgkinson

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

So many people die though they live, and it is not as if they don’t have life; they only refuse to keep breathing!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

If you think of something, do it.Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.

~ Lydia Davis

My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one's power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.

~ Geoff Dyer

I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination.

~ Henry James

They call it business because it does not become successful by a person's idleness. Go get busy if you want to do business; but be busy for the right reasons!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

It’s two things, you either choose to take risks through storms and win after the hail or you remain idle and die idle. Once laziness is deliberate, failure is not an accident!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

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

There is no harvest without hard work, therefore never expect chance to solve your problems of abject need for you. You must take deliberate actions!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

There are two types of patience. One is exercised in hard work and the other in idleness. Patience with hard work is the one that moves mountains. Patience in idleness moves nothing, not even cobwebs.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

~ Ivan Illich

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald