Idleness is many gathered miseries
in one name.
-Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
Of all our faults,
the one we excuse most easily
is idleness.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Between the great things we cannot do
and the small things we will not do,
the danger is that we shall do nothing.
-Adolphe Monod
Life is not long,
and too much of it must not pass
in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
-Samuel Johnson
Surely man was not created to be an idle fellow;
he was not set in this universal orchard
to stand still as a tree.
-Thomas Dekker
Indolence of which you are aware
and indolence of which you are not aware
are a thousand miles apart.
-Chinese Saying
Nature knows no pause in progress and development,
and attaches her curse to all inaction.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Idleness is emptiness;
the tree in which the sap is stagnant remains fruitless.
-Hosea Ballou
Iron rusts from disuse,
stagnant water loses its purity,
and in cold weather becomes frozen;
even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.
-Leonardo Da Vinci
Shun idleness.
It is a rust that attaches itself
to the most brilliant of metals.
-Voltaire
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life!
-Alfred Tennyson
Too much idleness, I have observed,
fills up a man's time much more completely,
and leaves him less his own master,
than any other sort of employment whatsoever.
-Edmund Burke
Idleness is the Dead Sea
that swallows all virtues.
-Benjamin Franklin
Inaction will cause a man to sink
into the slough of despond
and vanish without a trace.
-Farley Mowat
It is not enough to be busy.
So are the ants.
The question is: What are we busy about?
-Henry David Thoreau
A man is not idle
because he is absorbed in thought.
There is a visible labor
and there is an invisible labor.
-Victor Hugo
Work is not always required.
There is such a thing as sacred idleness.
-George MacDonald
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams,
that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
-Virginia Woolf
Rest is not idleness,
and to lie sometimes on the grass 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
In idle dreams I like to rest
preferring the unmanifest.
-Monique Louise De Nelle
