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 happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
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.
Believe me, I do not like idleness but work.
Idleness – a job that you have to go to, but not necessarily do anything – is the poet’s friend.
Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.
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.
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.
We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency.
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.
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Gluttony and idleness are two of life’s great joys, but they are not honourable.
Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.
Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
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.
Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.
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.’
Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.
I think the man who eats the bread of idleness is under a certain obligation to speak well of labor.
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.
Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.
Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish.
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.
Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.
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.
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.
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.
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.