Top 75 Idle Quotes

It is idle to waste time and discuss whether it was within our power and duty to see whether we could prepare a Bill better than the Remedial Bill.

My father passed away in 1994 and I cancelled all my plans. After I lost him, I didn’t know what to do and sat idle for many days. I got frustrated and angry for even little things.

When the idle poor become the idle rich, you’ll never know just who is who, or which is which.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

It is the artist’s function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.

If a brain is exercised properly, anyone can grow intelligence, at any age, and potentially by a lot. Or you can just let your brain idle – and watch it slowly, inexorably, go to seed like a sedentary body.

Cinema halls must be preserved by us and by the government. That business is in trouble today with monumental maintenance costs of idle machines and empty seats. When the crisis of the pandemic gets over and it is safe for all of us to go back to that experience we must, in hordes.

You find you have a lot of friends when you are rich and idle.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

I don’t like idle time.

Curiosity is idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a very rare and indispensable thing.

Surely man was not created to be an idle fellow; he was not set in this universal orchard to stand still as a tree.

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

I can only tell you that eggs, country ham, biscuits, a pot of coffee, a morning paper, a table by the window overlooking the veranda and putting green, listening to the idle chitchat of competitors, authors, wits and philosophers, hasn’t exactly been a torturous way to begin each day at the Masters all these years.

I didn’t ever imagine, except in the most idle, obviously wish-fulfillment, ego-gratification fantasies, that anything I wrote would ever win awards, let alone so many.

Woody is the guy who made me want to be a comic. I was in heaven and couldn’t stop smiling because he was my idle and 29 years after seeing Take the Money and Run, I was working for him.

I have ideas every day, and if I’m not carrying a pad of paper, I’m typing it into the notes thing on my iPhone, and it’s just ridiculous – idle hands are the devil’s plaything, and I can’t be the devil’s plaything. I got to be the devil; I got to be the guy making it all happen.

Idle time is the devil’s play.

A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.

How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellowes as I put them down.

Belief fails when it works not well indeed but is idle as a sleeping man… Each virtuous deed is strong when it is grounded upon the solidity of belief.

Always plenty to do. Cannot well be idle and believe will rather wear out than rust out.

I’m like, ‘Man, if I’m going to have this idle time, I might as well be in school, do something positive where I’m not just wasting my prime years and not getting something else in return.’ If I’m in school and training, that’s OK. I did that in college. It worked.

I am one of those people who cannot sit idle at home; I would get depressed. I have a constant hunger to create and to learn.

It’s easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.

Thanks be to God. Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.

Stoicism – and philosophy – are not the domains of idle professors. They are the succor of the successful and the men and women of action.

I think of myself as naturally idle. The trouble is, the ‘nothing’ that I do every day is not really nothing. I potter. I muck about with emails, I make coffee, I fiddle with my computer to make sure that the book I haven’t started writing is perfectly synced across all platforms and devices.

I’m not good when idle.

I will call out the lazy, the idle, and the ignorant. I will support the hard working, the industrious, and the law.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

I’m not very happy idle.

We have to remember that Dr. King was not an idle dreamer. Dr. King was a man of action. If Dr. King were here, he would challenge us and exhort us.

We can put millions of America’s idle young people to work helping to repair and restore America’s deteriorating infrastructure, public utilities, and transportation systems. Nothing would revitalize the nation’s sagging economy more than such a commitment.

If any person wish to be idle, let them fall in love.

I think it must be awful not to work. My only point in being idle is to rest so that I can work more… I’m only unhappy when I’m not working.

You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it; for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments – not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.

It’s funny – when I first started as an actor, obviously there were long periods of being idle and all you want to do is work. So if I ever get the compulsion to feel like I should complain or feel like I want to take a break, I just remember how I was before and be very grateful for it.

If I’m at a party, and there are lots of people running around, you’ll most likely find me on the floor, painting… I want to be at the party, but I want to do something. I’m just not very idle at all.

I’m not very happy idle. There’s always this voice in my head that says, ‘I should be writing.’

For Satan always finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.

As someone who took an oath to defend this country, I refuse to sit idle until the unimaginable occurs: Iran cheats or simply runs out the clock, and the largest state sponsor of terrorism threatens the United States and its allies with a nuclear weapon.

Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months.

I don’t know if I can relax. Relax, I can’t do. My brain, on idle, is a bad thing. I just get weird. I mean, not weird. I get, I get antsy.

The last time I was pulled over was in 2005. I was going 55 in a 35 mile per hour zone – which I don’t understand because you can barely even idle at 35 miles per hour. Anyway, I was ordered to go to traffic school. It was an 8-hour class and really painful.

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

Obama was elected on a slogan of hope and change because both were in short supply: the military exhausted by two wars, the banks failing their public trust, the U.S. Congress a comedy of dysfunction, and a federal government that seemed designed to idle on the sidelines.

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

I used to be quite a big video game player at university and post-university in that weird moment in life before you have a proper job and you’ve got a lot of idle time.

The sharing economy is about making use of any idle resource out there. We do love seeing other sharing-economy companies flourish.

Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talks of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.

The dangers which threaten us are twofold: First, from the Confederate forces, composed of men whose earnest convictions and reckless bravery it is idle to deny.

I’m homosexual… How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.

We Indians are Latin America’s moral reserve. We act according to a universal law that consists of three basic principles: do not steal, do not lie and do not be idle.