Idle Quotes - Page 15

• I humbly thank the gods benign, For all the blessings that are mine... The morning drips her dew for me, Noon spreads an opal canopy. Home-bound, the drifting cloud-crafts rest Where sunset ambers all the west; Soft o'er the poppy-fields of sleep, The drowsy winds of dreamland creep. What idle things are wealth and fame Beside the treasures one could name!

  Robert Loveman

  Gratitude, Morning, Sunset

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• There is no substitute under the heavens for productive labor. It is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic achievements.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Dream, Reality, Achievement

  Gordon B. Hinckley (2009). “Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes”, p.94, Harmony

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• Idle hands make fretful minds.

  Shelley Shepard Gray

  Hands, Mind, Idle Hands

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• If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must make allowances for the rich men's failings, and recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for work, a mortal's natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a great fortune, do but be splendid and idle?

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Fashion, Men, Temptation

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1869). “Miscellanies: The four Georges. The English humorists. Roundabout papers”, p.38

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• We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all. Because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand, and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you could hold onto that flame, great things could construct around it, that are massive and powerful and world changing, all held up by the tiniest of ideas.

  Nick Cave

  Powerful, Flames, Hands

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• Purge your mind of all aimless and idle thoughts, especially those that pry into the affairs of others or wish them ill.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Mind, Wish, Affair

  Marcus Aurelius, C. Scot Hicks, David Hicks (2002). “The Emperor's Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations”, p.34, Simon and Schuster

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• Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth," - our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, - not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sports, Kings, Inspiration

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “The Maine Woods - The Writings of Henry David Thoreau”, p.102, Read Books Ltd

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• We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

  Penelope Lively

  Latin, Museums, Lexicon

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.38, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of an idea never becomes apparent until you do it.

  Nick Cave

  Ideas, Bad Ideas

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• To carry the spirit of peace into war is a weak and cruel policy. When an extreme case calls for that remedy which is in its own nature most violent, and which, in such cases, is a remedy only because it is violent, it is idle to think of mitigating and diluting. Languid war can do nothing which negotiation or submission will do better: and to act on any other principle is, not to save blood and money, but to squander them.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Peace, War, Thinking

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• The wind, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear. Before the era of steam-engines, windmills were tried for draining mines; but though they were powerful machines, they were very irregular, so that in a long tract of calm weather the mines were drowned, and all the workmen thrown idle.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Country, Powerful, Wind

  William Stanley Jevons (1866). “The coal question: an enquiry concerning the progress of the Nation, and the probable exhaustion of our coal-mines”, p.144

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• It would be idle to say that we were not, from time to time, aware that a volcano slumbered fitfully beneath us. There were dark sides to the Slavery Question, for master, as for slave.

  Mary Virginia Terhune

  Dark, Volcanoes, Would Be

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• The purpose of marriage is not to have pleasure and to be idle but to procreate and bring up children, to support a household. This, of course, is a huge burden full of great cares and toils. But you have been created by God to be a husband or a wife and that you may learn to bear these troubles.

  Martin Luther

  Love, Children, Husband

  "Luther's Works: Lectures on Genesis".

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• On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

  Oscar Wilde

  Marriage, Husband, Men

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.62, University of Chicago Press

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• Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Thinking, Class, Special

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.3225, e-artnow

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• It may be true that people who are merely mathematicians have certain specific shortcomings; however that is not the fault of mathematics, but is true of every exclusive occupation. Likewise a mere linguist, a mere jurist, a mere soldier, a mere merchant, and so forth. One could add such idle chatter that when a certain exclusive occupation is often connected with certain specific shortcomings, it is on the other hand always free of certain other shortcomings.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Science, Hands, People

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• 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.

  Charles Tupper

  Power, Bills, Waste

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• Have we not all, amid life's petty strife, Some pure ideal of a noble life That once seemed possible? Did we not hear The flutter of its wings, and feel it near, And just within our reach? It was. And yet We lost it in this daily jar and fret, And now live idle in a vague regret; But still our place is kept, and it will wait, Ready for us to fill it, soon or late. No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been.

  Adelaide Anne Procter

  Stars, Regret, Wings

  "A Legend of Provence" l. 284 (1861)

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• Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Class, Giving, Lazy

  Alexis de Tocqueville (2006). “Memoir on Pauperism: Does Public Charity Produce an Idle And Dependent Class of Society?”, p.26, Cosimo, Inc.

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• I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks - who had the genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked for charity, under the pretense of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, Art, Children

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• 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.

  Robert Dale Owen

  Men, Ethos, Bravery

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• Another hundred years may pass before we understand the true significance of Apollo. Lunar exploration was not the equivalent of an American pyramid, some idle monument to technology, but more of a Rosetta stone, a key to unlocking dreams as yet undreamed.

  Gene Cernan

  Dream, Technology, Keys

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• Man is responsible not only for every deed, but also for every idle word and thought.

  David O. McKay

  Men, Deeds, Responsible

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• The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.

  Ilka Chase

  Successful, Opportunity, Play

  Ilka Chase (1945). “Past Imperfect”, Pocket Books of Canada

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• Idle men tempt the devil to tempt them.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Men, Devil

  Charles Spurgeon (2012). “John Ploughman's Talks”, p.5, Whitaker House

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