Samuel Johnson Quotes About Sloth

• It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.

  Samuel Johnson

  Sloth, Ease, Laziness

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy, Francis Pearson Walesby (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D..: The Adventurer and Idler”, p.11

• If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.

  Samuel Johnson

  Advice, Solitude, Sloth

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (letter to Boswell, 27 Oct. 1779)

• There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business.

  Samuel Johnson

  Business, Sloth, Laziness

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy, Francis Pearson Walesby (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D..: The Adventurer and Idler”, p.291

• Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Sloth, Calling

  Samuel Johnson, Francis Pearson Walesby, Arthur Murphy (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson: Reviews, politica. tracts, and lives of eminent persons”, p.285

• Knowledge is praised and desired by multitudes whom her charms could never rouse from the couch of sloth; whom the faintest invitation of pleasure draws away from their studies; to whom any other method of wearing the day is more eligible than the use of books, and who are more easily engaged by any conversation than such as may rectify their notions or enlarge their comprehension.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Knowledge, Sloth

  Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, Samuel Johnson (1778). “A Grammar of the Italian Language: With a Copious Praxis of Moral Sentences. To which is Added an English Grammar for the Use of the Italians”, p.324

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