Idleness Quotes - Page 10

• Every man must patiently bide his time. He must wait -- not in listless idleness but in constant, steady, cheerful endeavors, always willing and fulfilling and accomplishing his task, that when the occasion comes he may be equal to the occasion.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Patience, Men, Waiting

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Illustrated)”, p.1882, Delphi Classics

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• Equality is. one of the most consummate scoundrels that ever crept from the brain of a political juggler--a fellow who thrusts his hand into the pocket of honest industry or enterprising talent, and squanders their hard-earned profits on profligate idleness or indolent stupidity.

  James Kirke Paulding

  Equality, Hands, Stupidity

  Washington Irving, William Irving, James Kirke Paulding (1857). “Salmagundi: Or, The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. [pseud.] and Others ....”, p.162

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• And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

  Mary Oliver

  Letting Go, Rain, Want

  Mary Oliver (1998). “West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems”, p.5, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

  Natalie Clifford Barney

  Inspiration, Writing, Night

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• I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.

  E. M. Forster

  Hate, Stupidity, Petty

  E. M. Forster (2014). “Great Novels of E. M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End”, p.71, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

  Albert Camus

  Retirement, Moving, Next Move

  Albert Camus (2012). “Happy Death”, p.82, Vintage

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• Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up tine, supply it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.

  William Shakespeare

  Weed, Lying, Garden

  William Shakespeare, Gayle Holste (2002). “Othello”, p.68, Barron's Educational Series

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• I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Secret, Approach

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea”, p.17, Faber & Faber

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• Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Heart, Years, Inertia

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• The falsest of all philosophies is that which, under the pretext of delivering men from the embarrassment of their passions, counsels idleness and the abandonment and neglect of themselves.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Philosophy, Passion, Men

  Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues (1903). “La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims”

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• Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Men, Hideous

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• We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Sacrifice, Hatred, Humanity

  "Orthodoxy". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Chapter VIII. "The Romances of Orthodoxy", 1908.

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• If I gave my mother a knitted scarf she'd be worried I was wasting my time doing stupid stuff like knitting instead of school work. Presenting a homemade knitted object to my parents was actually like handing them a detailed backlog of my idleness.

  Mindy Kaling

  Mother, Stupid, School

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• Communism is the flower of idleness.

  George Ticknor

  Flower, Communism

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• One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Reading, Wish

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.385

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• The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Military, Army, Chiefs

  Leo Tolstoy (2016). “WAR AND PEACE Complete Edition – All 15 Books in One Volume (World Classics Series): The Magnum Opus of the Greatest Russian Novelists and Author of Anna Karenina & The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Including the Biography & Memoirs of the Author)”, p.651, e-artnow

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• 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

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• I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

  Marcel Proust

  Pain, Past, Survival

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.4860, Delphi Classics

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• Idleness, simon-pure, from which all manner of good springs like seed from a fallow soil, is sure to be misnamed and misconstrued.

  Louise Imogen Guiney

  Spring, Soil, Misconstrued

  Louise Imogen Guiney (1885). “Goose-quill Papers”

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• Laughing is not the first expression of joy. ... A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears.

  Margaret Oliphant

  Fun, Expression, Laughing

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• As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property.

  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

  Daughter, Science, Astronomy

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• Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide,
  First strip off all her equipage of Pride,
  Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,
  Or Learning's Luxury or idleness,
  Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain
  Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.

  Alexander Pope

  Pain, Learning, Pride

  Alexander Pope (1873). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope Edited with Notes and Introductory Memoir by Adolphus William Ward”, p.202

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• Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; and the knowledge we acquire by it only a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more.

  Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

  Ignorance, Men, Citizens

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• Organisation of social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack upon Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.

  William Beveridge

  Ignorance, Progress, Giants

  "Social Insurance and Allied Services". The "Beveridge Report" by William Beveridge (Part 1, 8), November 1942.

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• War begets quiet, quiet idleness, idleness disorder, disorder ruin; likewise ruin order, order virtue, virtue glory, and good fortune.

  Walter Raleigh

  War, Order, Ruins

  Walter Raleigh (1829). “The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh”, p.122

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