Indolence Quotes - Page 2

• Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.

  Jean Cocteau

  Inspiration, Play, Profound

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• He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.

  John Keats

  Thinking, Awake, Idle

  John Keats (2015). “John Keats - The Man Behind The Lyrics: Life, letters, and literary remains: Complete Letters and Two Extensive Biographies of one of the most beloved English Romantic poets”, p.440, e-artnow

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• The more I think about it, the more there is to be said for the sloth. He sleeps fifteen to eighteen hours a day and is known to have taken forty-eight days to travel four miles. He hangs in the trees after he's dead. But he lives longer than the cheetah.

  Erma Bombeck

  Funny, Taken, Sleep

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• Love is the business of the idle, but the idleness of the busy.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Love, Busy, Idle

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• Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish.

  Francois Rabelais

  Art, World, Cupid

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• Once Fang took pep pills and they worked - the only time he ever ran to bed.

  Phyllis Diller

  Funny, Sloth, Pills

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• Everybody knows how lazy he is. One day the neighbors saw Fang mow the lawn and I got three Get Well cards.

  Phyllis Diller

  Funny, Get Well, Sloth

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• Your husband is lazy if the directions on his medicine say, "A teaspoon before going to bed," and in one day he uses seven bottles.

  Phyllis Diller

  Funny, Husband, Medicine

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• It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
  To puff and look important and to say:-
  'Though we know we should defeat you,
  we have not the time to meet you,
  We will therefore pay you cash to go away.'

  Rudyard Kipling

  Funny, Temptation, Sloth

  School History "Dane-Geld (A.D. 980 - 1016)" (1911).

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• The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Solitude, Occupation, Want

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• In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.

  James Hutton

  Science, Curiosity, Desire

  James Hutton (1997). “Theory of the Earth: With Proofs and Illustrations, in Four Parts”, p.16, Geological Society of London

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• It should seem that indolence itself would incline a person to be honest, as it requires infinitely greater pains and contrivance to be a knave.

  William Shenstone

  Honesty, Pain, Knaves

  William Shenstone (1804). “Essays on Men and Manners”, p.151

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• As a sex, women are habitually indolent; and every thing tends to make them so.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Sex

  Mary Wollstonecraft (1796). “A vindication of the rights of woman: with strictures on political and moral subjects”, p.293

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• Venerate four characters: the sanguine who has checked volatility and the rage for pleasure; the choleric who has subdued passion and pride; the phlegmatic emerged from indolence; and the melancholy who has dismissed avarice, suspicion and asperity.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Character, Passion, Pride

  "Aphorisms on Man" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, (c. 1788).

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• Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Funny, Sloth, Degrees

  Ambrose Bierce (2012). “The Devil's Dictionary”, p.69, Courier Corporation

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• Indolence and stupidity are first cousins.

  Antoine Rivarol

  Cousin, Stupidity, Firsts

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• There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

  Franz Kafka

  Two, Paradise, Return

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?

  Ronald Reagan

  Funny, Hilarious, Work

  Ronald Reagan (2004). “Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches”, p.420, Simon and Schuster

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• Indolence is the worst enemy that the church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar, stretching themselves on beds of ease, or sit idly with folded hands looking lazily out on fields white for the harvest, but where no sickle rings against the wheat.

  Frederic Dan Huntington

  Sleep, Men, Worst Enemy

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 344, 1895.

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• You can't imagine what a pleasure this complete laziness is to me: not a thought in my brain- you might send a ball rolling through it!

  Leo Tolstoy

  Funny, Sloth, Brain

  Leo Tolstoy (2016). “The Complete Novels of Leo Tolstoy in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich... (Including Biographies of the Author)”, p.341, e-artnow

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• The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.

  Benjamin Haydon

  Character, Winning, Names

  Benjamin Robert Haydon, Frederick Wordsworth Haydon (1876). “Correspondence and Table-talk: With a Memoir”, p.467

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• There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

  Joseph Conrad

  Life, Men, Here And There

  Joseph Conrad (1905). “Lord Jim”, p.31, McClure, Phillips & Company

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• Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

  James Madison

  Religious, Atheist, Secular Society

  James Madison, Ralph Ketcham “Selected Writings of James Madison”, Hackett Publishing

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• The Book of Proverbs deals very hard blows against sluggards, and Christian ministers do well frequently to denounce the great sin of idleness, which is the mother of a huge family of sins.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Bible, Christian, Mother

  Spurgeon, Charles H. “The Complete Works of Charles Spurgeon, Volume 55: Sermons 3125-3177”, Delmarva Publications, Inc.

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• Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Inspirational, Happiness, Stress

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