Quotations on Idleness

Prolonged idleness paralyzes initiative.

~ Unknown

Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright.

~ Benjamin Franklin

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

~ George Bernard Shaw

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

~ Oscar Wilde

Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

That man is idle who can do something better.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

~ Thomas Carlyle

We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness - either enforced or voluntary. The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself - and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.

~ Agatha Christie

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

~ Virginia Woolf

Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler.

~ Samuel Johnson

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

Idleness is the only refuge of weak minds, and the holiday of fools.

~ Earl of Chesterfield

It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Even if a farmer intends to loaf, he gets up in time to have an early start.

~ Edgar Watson Howe

A loafer always has the correct time.

~ Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

An idle brain is the devil's workshop.

~ Proverbs

- English Proverb

If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardships of his lot, set him to do nothing.

~ Blaise Pascal

An idler is a watch that wants both hands,
As useless if it goes as it stands.

~ William Cowper

Absence of occupation is not rest;
A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.

~ William Cowper