Idle Quotes - Page 11

And if nobody reads me, shall I have wasted my time, when I have beguiled so many idle hours with such pleasant and profitable reflections?

Michel de Montaigne

Book, Reading, Reflection

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Go, all of you poor people, in the name of God the Creator, and let him forever be your guide. And henceforth, do not be beguiledby these idle and useless pilgrimages. See to your families, and work, each one of you, in your vocation, raise your children, and live as the good Apostle Paul teaches you.

Francois Rabelais

Wisdom, Children, Names

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Even an idle phone conversation when driving takes a 40 percent bite out of your focus and, surprisingly, can have the same effect as being drunk.

Gary W. Keller

Phones, Drunk, Focus

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Most women indulge in idle gossip, which is the henchman of rumor and scandal.

Octave Feuillet

Indulge In, Gossip, Rumor

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Nothing is more idle than to inquire after happiness, which nature has kindly placed within our reach.

Samuel Johnson

Happiness

Samuel Johnson (2012). “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia”, p.54, Simon and Schuster

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Leave your bed upon the first desertion of sleep; it being ill for the eye's to read lying, and worse for the mind to be idle; since the head during that laziness is commonly a cage for unclean thoughts.

Frances Osborne

Lying, Sleep, Eye

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Why, just a couple of economic seasons ago, was idle cash considered an indication of bad management or lazy management? Because it meant that management didn't have this money out at work ... Now look. Presto! A new fashion! Cash is back in! Denigrating liquidity has dropped quicker than hemlines. A management is now saluted if it has some cash, some liquidity, doesn't have to go to the money market at huge interest rates to get the wherewithal to keep going and growing. Along with Ben Franklin, my father and your father would understand and applaud this new economic fashion.

Malcolm Forbes

Fashion, Money, Couple

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The busy man has few idle visitors; to the boiling pot the flies come not.

Benjamin Franklin

Men, Visitors, Busy

Benjamin Franklin, Ormond Seavey (1998). “Autobiography and Other Writings”, p.283, Oxford University Press, USA

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Denied the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery.

Jack London

Play, Energy, Process

Jack London (2015). “White Fang (Arcadia Classics)”, p.90, Jack London

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Just enough sense to stick with something-a chore, task, project, until its completed pays off much better than idle intelligence, even if idle intelligence be of genius caliber.

David J. Schwartz

Tasks, Genius, Pay

David J Schwartz (2016). “The Magic of Thinking Big”, p.31, Random House

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As well might you leave the fairies to plough your land or the idle winds to sow it, as sit down and wait for freedom.

Thomas Davis

Wind, Land, Waiting

Thomas Osborne Davis (1920*). “Thomas Davis: Selections from His Prose and Poetry”

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Avoid idleness, and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and useful employment; for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses where the soul is unemployed and the body is at ease; for no easy, healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but of all employments, bodily labor is the most useful, and of the greatest benefit for driving away the Devil.

Jeremy Taylor

Space, Soul, Lust

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The idle wife ranked with the ornamentally wrought weapon and with the splendid offering to the gods as a measure of the man's power to waste, and therefore his superiority over other men. ... As is the case with any other object of art, her uselessness is her use.

Emily James Smith Putnam

Art, Men, Offering

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... while one-half of the people of the United States are robbed of their inherent right of personal representation in this freestcountry on the face of the globe, it is idle for us to expect that the men who thus rob women will not rob each other as individuals, corporations and Government.

Susan B. Anthony

Men, People, Half

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The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!

Victor Hugo

Sleep, August, Paris

Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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Arguments derived from probabilities are idle.

Plato

Argument, Probability

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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

William James

Real, Design, World

William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.40, 谷月社

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Stories ought not to be just little bits of fantasy that are used to wile away an idle hour; from the beginning of the human race stories have been used - by priests, by bards, by medicine men - as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities.

Joan Aiken

Teaching, Healing, Mean

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Never allow any unnecessary or vain thought to occupy your mind. This is more easily said than done. You cannot make your mind a blank all at once. So in the beginning try to prevent evil or idle thoughts by occupying your mind with the analysis of your own faults, or the contemplation of the Perfect Ones.

H. P. Blavatsky

Evil, Perfect, Mind

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Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves.

James Russell Lowell

Hero, Slave, Easy

James Russell Lowell (1857). “Miscellaneous poems. Memorial verses. Sonnets. I-XXVII. L'Envoi. Vision of Sir Launfal”, p.163

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I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate.

James Gates Percival

Father, Mean, Fool

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He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery.

William Hazlitt

Art, Lying, Philosophy

William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1471, Delphi Classics

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I belong to an ancient, idle, wild and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard-working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which in some way or another, has satisfied them. I am a storyteller.

Isak Dinesen

Country, Real, Hard Work

Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen (1987). “On Modern Marriage and Other Observations”

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Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.

Thomas Carlyle

Intellectual, Mind, Territory

Thomas Carlyle (1845). “The Life of Friedrich Schiller: Comprehending an Examination of His Works”, p.56, London : Chapman and Hall

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Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.

Thomas Carlyle

Art, Nature, Years

Thomas Carlyle, Rodger L. Tarr, Mark Engel (2000). “Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books”, p.80, Univ of California Press

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