Popular quotes about Idleness! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Give me the boy who rouses when he is praised, who profits when he is encouraged and who cries when he is defeated. Such a boy will be fired by ambition; he will be stung by reproach, and animated by preference; never shall I apprehend any bad consequences from idleness in such a boy.
QuintilianEvery man must patiently bide his time. He must wait -- not in listless idleness but in constant, steady, cheerful endeavors, always willing and fulfilling and accomplishing his task, that when the occasion comes he may be equal to the occasion.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowIdleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.
Victor HugoThe moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.
Elizabeth Cady StantonOf all our faults, the one we avow most easily is idleness; we persuade ourselves that it is allied to all the peaceable virtues,and as for the others, that it does not destroy them utterly, but only suspends the exercise of their functions.
Francois de La RochefoucauldIDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.
Ambrose BierceFour Seasons fill the measure of the year; There are four seasons in the mind of man: He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear Takes in all beauty with an easy span: He has his Summer, when luxuriously Spring's honey'd cud of youthful thought he loves To ruminate, and by such dreaming high Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings He furleth close; contented so to look On mists in idlenessโto let fair things Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook. He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
John KeatsIdleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.
Hannah MoreA contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed.
Samuel JohnsonNational progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
Samuel SmilesBourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.
Karl MarxInstead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.
Geraldine BrooksThe soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.
Thomas TraherneTo blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged.
Norman MailerDo not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness--they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness.
Friedrich NietzscheI understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.
Marcel ProustWhatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; and the knowledge we acquire by it only a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount BolingbrokeThe Book of Proverbs deals very hard blows against sluggards, and Christian ministers do well frequently to denounce the great sin of idleness, which is the mother of a huge family of sins.
Charles SpurgeonSimplifying our lives does not mean sinking into idleness, but on the contrary, getting rid of the most subtle aspect of laziness: the one which makes us take on thousands of less important activities.
Matthieu RicardThe prosperity of a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness is an atrophy. Whatever body or society wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay, and every being that continues to be fed, and eases to labor, takes away something from the public stock.
Samuel JohnsonIt is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia WoolfIdleness 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 AllenDebt is the secret foe of thrift, as vice and idleness are its open foes. The debt habit is the twin brother of poverty.
Theodore T. Munger