Top 30 Idleness Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Idleness Quotes from famous people such as Anton Chekhov, John Lubbock, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, John Cooper Clarke, Ezra Cornell, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happin

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
Anton Chekhov
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
Believe me, I do not like idleness but work.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Idleness – a job that you have to go to, but not necessarily do anything – is the poet’s friend.
John Cooper Clarke
Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.
Ezra Cornell
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
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
We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency.
Eamon de Valera
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
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
Franz Kafka
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
Soren Kierkegaard
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
Gluttony and idleness are two of life’s great joys, but they are not honourable.
Julie Burchill
Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
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
Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.
Johann G. Seume
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
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
I think the man who eats the bread of idleness is under a certain obligation to speak well of labor.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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 the refuge of weak minds.
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish.
Francois Rabelais
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
Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
Benjamin Franklin
Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.
Hesiod
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
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
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 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