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Quotes about Idleness

inert MAZY idle
Averse or disinclined to
work, activity or exertion
Slow-moving
O
sluggish c/at/v/a/
iliactive d
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IDLENESS
•bhe k134!/i34$ of All Oppressionsa„
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Golf is a day
spent in a round
of strenuous
idleness
W/'/ham Wordsworth
meetvilletom
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Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes
on the grass under the trees on
a summer's day, listening to the
murmur of water, or watching the clouds •
float across the sky
—john lubbock
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Essays in
Idleness
The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkö
Translated by Donald Keene
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"To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has
no justice unless we are also willing to judge every
rich member of society by how productive. he. or
she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely
that there's more idleness and abuse of
government favors among the economically
privileged than among the ranks of the
disadvantaged."
•Norman Mailer, author (1923-2007)
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"DILIGENCE IS THE MOTHER OF GOOD FORTUNE,
AND IDLENESS, ITS OPPOSITE, NEVER BROUGHT
A MAN TO THE GOAL OF ANY OF HIS BEST
WISHES."
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
O Lifehack Quotes
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Yet it is in our idleness,
in our dreams, that the
submerged truth
sometimes comes to the
top.
Virginig Woo'f
English writer
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1882-1941
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"IN IDLENESS
THERE IS
A PERPETUAL
DESPAIR."
-THOMAS CARLYLE
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Idleness is
the beginning
of all Vice,
the crown of
all virtues.
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Idleness is only a coarse
name for my infinite
capacity for living in the
present.
Cyril Connolly
QUOTEHD.COM
English Critic
1903 • 1974
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IDLENESS IS THE
ROOT OF ALL EVIL
Proverb
PICTURE QUOTES .oo..w
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Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues. Votes: 7

Franz Kafka
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Idleness is the parent of psychology. Votes: 6

Friedrich Nietzsche
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Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron. Votes: 5

Ezra Cornell
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Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds. Votes: 4

Philip Stanhope
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Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. Votes: 4

Jerome K. Jerome
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Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease. Votes: 4

Benjamin Franklin
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Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness. Votes: 4

William Wordsworth
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Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind. Votes: 4

Henry Ford
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Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything. Votes: 4

Floyd Dell
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Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and governments. Votes: 4

Benjamin Franklin
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Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind. Votes: 4

Johann G. Seume
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present. Votes: 4

Cyril Connolly
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Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good. Votes: 4

Soren Kierkegaard
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Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes. Votes: 4

Miguel de Cervantes
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I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble. Votes: 4

Agatha Christie
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Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profit others and ourselves Votes: 4

Anne Baxter
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Idleness is paralysis. Votes: 3

Roswell Dwight Hitchcock
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Idleness induces caprice. Votes: 3

James Russell Lowell
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Trouble Springs From Idleness. Votes: 3

Benjamin Franklin
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Idleness ruins the constitution Votes: 3

Ovid
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Idleness breeds our better virtues. Votes: 3

William Faulkner
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Idleness is the key of beggary. Votes: 3

Charles Spurgeon
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Idleness only leads to bad deeds Votes: 3

Magnus Stenbock
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Idleness is an appendix to nobility. Votes: 3

Robert Burton
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Idleness is an enemy of the soul. Votes: 3

Benedict of Nursia
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Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Votes: 3

Anselm of Canterbury
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Idleness is the great plague of India. Votes: 3

Mahatma Gandhi
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Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. Votes: 3

Albert Camus
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Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions. Votes: 3

Victor Hugo
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Idleness is hells fishhook for catching souls. Votes: 3

Ignatius of Loyola
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Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel. Votes: 3

John Quincy Adams
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Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds. Votes: 3

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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Idleness is the sepulchre of a living man. Votes: 3

J. G. Holland
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Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds. Votes: 3

Lord Chesterfield
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Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all virtues Votes: 3

Benjamin Franklin
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Idleness is seductive.Just relax and do nothing, it says. Votes: 3

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
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Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work. Votes: 3

Frederick Herzberg
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Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron Votes: 3

Ezra Cornell
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness. Votes: 3

Thomas Carlyle
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Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure. Votes: 3

Tom Hodgkinson
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Idleness is more an infirmity of the mind than of the body. Votes: 3

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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Idleness or boredom has no place in the life of a Christian. Votes: 3

Pope Paul VI
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Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless. Votes: 3

Hosea Ballou
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Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste. Votes: 3

Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Idleness and lack of occupation tend - nay are dragged - towards evil.... Votes: 3

Hippocrates
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Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger. Votes: 3

Victor Hugo
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Four things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. Votes: 3

Dorothy Parker
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Idleness makes people feeble and peevish. Work makes them stalwart and prone to anger. Votes: 3

Mason Cooley
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Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind. Votes: 3

Johann Gottfried Seume
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Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is ? a vice? Votes: 3

Friedrich Nietzsche
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Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it. Votes: 3

Tom Hodgkinson
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Idleness and fear keeps us in the path of duty, but our virtue often gets the praise. Votes: 3

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long. Votes: 3

Cesare Pavese
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Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical. Votes: 3

Thomas Jefferson
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Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction; the others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness. Votes: 3

William Beveridge
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Labor is life! 'Tis the still water faileth; Idleness ever despaireth, bewaileth; Keep the watch wound, for the dark rust assaileth. Votes: 3

Frances Sargent Osgood
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His Labor is a Chant - His Idleness -a Tune - Oh, for a Bee's experience Of Clovers, and of Noon! Votes: 3

Emily Dickinson
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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 ... Votes: 3

Louise Imogen Guiney
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Idleness is a great enemy to mankind. There is no friend like energy, for, if you cultivate that, it will never fail. Votes: 3

Bhartrhari
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Idleness leads to relaxation, sooner or later bringing about ideological and material corruption, accompanied by lack of discipline, anarchy chaos and defeat. Votes: 3

Samora Machel
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Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper. Votes: 3

Hannah More
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Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company. Votes: 3

Jeremy Collier
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Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all virtues. Be active in business, that temptation may miss her aim; the bird that sits is easily shot. Votes: 3

Benjamin Franklin
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Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading. Votes: 3

Benedict of Nursia
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Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments. If we can get rid of the former, we may easily bear the latter. Votes: 3

Benjamin Franklin
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Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man's mind, under the general head of liberty. Votes: 3

Maria Edgeworth
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Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profit others and ourselves. Votes: 3

Anne Baxter
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It is idleness that is the curse of man - not labour. Idleness eats the heart out of men as of nations, and consumes them as rust does iron. Votes: 3

Samuel Smiles
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Woe to those who lead idle lives. Idleness is a dreadful illness and must be cured in childhood. If it is not cured then, it can never be cured. Votes: 3

Carlo Collodi
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Taxes are indeed very heavy - We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness. Three times as much by our Pride. And four times as much by our Folly. Votes: 3

Benjamin Franklin
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The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain. Votes: 3

Thomas Traherne
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Idleness and timidity often despair without being overcome, and forbear attempts for fear of being defeated; and we may promote the invigoration of faint endeavors, by showing what has already been performed. Votes: 3

Samuel Johnson
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Give me to live with Love alone And let the world go dine and dress; For Love hath lowly haunts... If life's a flower, I choose my own 'T is "love in Idleness". Votes: 3

Samuel Laman Blanchard
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Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. Votes: 3

Robert Louis Stevenson
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Idleness does drive me crazy, but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it. Votes: 3

Karen Allen
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Idleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery. Votes: 3

Victor Hugo
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Idleness and constancy fix the mind to what it finds easy and agreeable. This habit always confines and cramps up our knowledge; and no one has ever taken the trouble to stretch and carry his understanding as far as it could go. Votes: 3

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended.... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored.... Votes: 3

Soren Kierkegaard
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Observe a method in the distribution of your time. Every hour will then know its proper employment, and no time will be lost. Idleness will be shut out at every avenue, and with her that numerous body of vices that make up her train. Votes: 3

Thomas Hartwell Horne
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It is a mistake to imagine, that the violent passions only, such as ambition and love, can triumph over the rest. Idleness, languid as it is, often masters them all; she influences all our designs and actions, and insensibly consumes and destroys both passions and virtues. Votes: 3

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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Rather do what is nothing to the purpose than be idle; that the devil may find thee doing. The bird that sits is easily shot, when fliers scape the fowler. Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all the virtues, and the self-made sepulchre of a living man. Votes: 3

Francis Quarles
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Busy idleness urges us on. Votes: 2

Horace
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Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible. Votes: 2

Mahatma Gandhi
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We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency. Votes: 2

Eamon de Valera
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I live an idle burden to the ground. Votes: 2

Homer
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Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is. Votes: 2

William Barrett
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Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace. Votes: 2

Hesiod
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The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth. Votes: 2

Oscar Wilde
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Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness. Votes: 2

George MacDonald
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Gluttony and idleness are two of life's great joys, but they are not honourable. Votes: 2

Julie Burchill
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Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette. Votes: 2

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. Votes: 2

Virginia Woolf
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Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. Votes: 2

Virginia Woolf
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An idler is a watch that wants both hands; As useless if it goes as when it stands. Votes: 2

William Cowper
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Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness. Votes: 2

Ambrose Bierce
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It's heartbreaking to see so many people trapped in a web of enforced idleness, deep debt, and gnawing self-doubt. Votes: 2

William J. Clinton
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Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable. Votes: 2

Anton Chekhov
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Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness. Votes: 2

Herman Melville
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It is rather hard to be accused of shiftlessness and idleness when the accuser closes the avenue of labour and industrial pursuits to us. Votes: 2

George H. White
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No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely." ~ Sherlock Holmes Votes: 2

Arthur Conan Doyle
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It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where people don't care to do anything, they shelter themselves under a permission that it cannot be done. Votes: 2

Robert South
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Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger. Votes: 2

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Votes: 2

Lord Chesterfield
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Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Votes: 2

Philip Stanhope
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To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself. Votes: 2

Samuel Johnson
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There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor. Votes: 2

John Ruskin
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Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. Votes: 2

John Lubbock
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I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness. Votes: 2

Brenda Ueland
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Writing is busy idleness. Votes: 0

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Sluggish idleness--the nurse of sin. Votes: 0

Edmund Spenser
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Grief is a species of idleness. Votes: 0

Samuel Johnson
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How sweet and sacred idleness is! Votes: 0

Walter Savage Landor
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Communism is the flower of idleness. Votes: 0

George Ticknor
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The frivolous work of polished idleness. Votes: 0

James Mackintosh
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Without execution, thinking is mere idleness. Votes: 0

Winston Churchill
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I wonder at the idleness of tears. Votes: 0

Lizette Woodworth Reese
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Gossip, like ennui, is born of idleness. Votes: 0

Ninon de L'Enclos
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair. Votes: 0

Thomas Carlyle
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Fear is nothing but idleness of the will... Votes: 0

Eliphas Levi
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As brightness is to rustiness, so labor excelleth idleness. Votes: 0

Thales
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Toil is no source of shame; idleness is shame. Votes: 0

Hesiod
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He lacks much who has no aptitude for idleness. Votes: 0

Louise Wilder
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I'm not a fan of idleness, except in small doses. Votes: 0

Timothy Ferriss
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Remove the temptation of idleness and Cupid's bow is useless. Votes: 0

Ovid
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I'm not a fan of idleness, except in small doses. Votes: 0

Tim Ferriss
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Prefer diligence before idleness, unless you esteem rust above brightness. Votes: 0

Plato
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Busy idleness urges us on. [Lat., Strenua nos exercet inertia.] Votes: 0

Horace
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity. Votes: 0

Simone de Beauvoir
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Hereditary wealth is in reality a premium paid to idleness. Votes: 0

William Godwin
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An army is strengthened by labor and enervated by idleness. Votes: 0

Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus
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Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness. Votes: 0

Thomas Carlyle
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Mistakes are good, successes are great, and idleness is a sin. Votes: 0

Mike Michalowicz
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I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness. Votes: 0

E. M. Forster
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In work there is no shame; shame is in the idleness. Votes: 0

Hesiod
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Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness. Votes: 0

Samuel Butler
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Wasting time is negative, but there is something positive about idleness. Votes: 0

Russell Lynes
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In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasure Votes: 0

George Eliot
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A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness. Votes: 0

Natalie Clifford Barney
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The principle trap that the devil sets for young people is idleness. Votes: 0

John Bosco
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Love is born of idleness and, once born, by idleness is fostered. Votes: 0

Ovid
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The outlook for our country lies in the quality of its idleness. Votes: 0

Irwin Edman
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Love is the business of the idle, but the idleness of the busy. Votes: 0

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property. Votes: 0

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
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Shun idleness. It is rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals. Votes: 0

Voltaire
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The vices of idleness are only to be shaken off by active employment. Votes: 0

Seneca the Younger
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What heart can think, or tongue express, The harm that groweth of idleness? Votes: 0

John Heywood
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Of all our faults, the one that we excuse most easily is idleness. Votes: 0

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Votes: 0

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness. Votes: 0

Henry Ward Beecher
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Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish. Votes: 0

Francois Rabelais
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My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way. Votes: 0

Virginia Woolf
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He that never labors may know the pains of idleness, but not the pleasures. Votes: 0

Samuel Johnson
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Spirituality for the most part is a mask worn by idleness, arrogance and greed. Votes: 0

Robert Green Ingersoll
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The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder. Votes: 0

T. S. Eliot
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A soldier's time is passed in distress and danger, or in idleness and corruption. Votes: 0

Samuel Johnson
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As pride sometimes is hid under humility, idleness if often covered by turbulence and hurry. Votes: 0

Samuel Johnson
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I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea. Votes: 0

Mary Oliver
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Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness. Votes: 0

William Ralph Inge
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Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart. Votes: 0

Gustave Flaubert
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The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach. Votes: 0

Oscar Wilde
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices Votes: 0

Paul Valery
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The savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but the philosopher lives simply through wisdom. Votes: 0

Henry David Thoreau
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We are more heavily taxed by our idleness, pride and folly than we are taxed by government. Votes: 0

Benjamin Franklin
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He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep. Votes: 0

John Keats
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Ay! idleness! the rich folks never fail To find some reason why the poor deserve Their miseries. Votes: 0

Robert Southey
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There is nothing more dangerous than idleness...In labor there is salvation; in labor there is safety. Votes: 0

Francis M. Lyman
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The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness. Votes: 0

Leo Tolstoy
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I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural. Votes: 0

Lawrence Durrell
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Poverty is not dishonorable in itself, but only when it comes from idleness, intemperance, extravagance, and folly. Votes: 0

Plutarch
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Flee idleness... for no one is more exposed to such temptations than he who has nothing to do. Votes: 0

Robert Bellarmine
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War begets quiet, quiet idleness, idleness disorder, disorder ruin; likewise ruin order, order virtue, virtue glory, and good fortune. Votes: 0

Walter Raleigh
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Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value. Votes: 0

Benjamin Jowett
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I know of nothing that is so degenerating and so dangerous as idleness, for the brain will seek out mischief. Votes: 0

Francis M. Lyman
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We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary. Votes: 0

Agatha Christie
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IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices. Votes: 0

Ambrose Bierce
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Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence. Votes: 0

Geraldine Brooks
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There is not a thing on the face of the earth that I abhor so much as idleness or idle people. Votes: 0

George Whitefield
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National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice. Votes: 0

Samuel Smiles
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Pride, anger, gluttony, and idleness are sometimes conquered, but the conversion of a malicious and envious mind is a kind of miracle. Votes: 0

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
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No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive. Votes: 0

Abraham Lincoln
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His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political. Votes: 0

Iain Pears
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Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms, its persecutions and its devices for fattening idleness on the earnings of the people. Votes: 0

Thomas Jefferson
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Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell. Votes: 0

Beatrice Webb
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That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness. Votes: 0

Henry Ford
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The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality--counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. Votes: 0

Joseph Conrad
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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. Votes: 0

Samuel Johnson
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Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor. Votes: 0

Mark Twain
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Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. Votes: 0

Robert Louis Stevenson
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Do not be deceived! The busiest people harbor the greatest weariness, their restlessness is weakness--they no longer have the capacity for waiting and idleness. Votes: 0

Friedrich Nietzsche
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Debt is the secret foe of thrift, as vice and idleness are its open foes. The debt habit is the twin brother of poverty. Votes: 0

Theodore T. Munger
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The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods. Votes: 0

Paul Lafargue
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For his part, Blind Seer had no difficulty accepting idleness. A wolf proverb stated: "Hunt when hungry, sleep when not, for hunger always returns. Votes: 0

Jane Lindskold
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It is weakness which makes us hate an enemy and seek revenge, and it is idleness that pacifies us and causes us to neglect it. Votes: 0

Jean de la Bruyere
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There is no curse equal to the curse of idleness. It destroys the man, the group, the people, or the nation who suffer under it. Votes: 0

J. Reuben Clark
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I was never comfortable with the risk of climbing in the Himalayas, or the amount of time in idleness that is involved in the Everest expedition. Votes: 0

Steve Fossett
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Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time more completely and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever Votes: 0

Edmund Burke
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It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually. Votes: 0

Anthony Trollope
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I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain. Votes: 0

Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting." Votes: 0

Vladimir Nabokov
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The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting. Votes: 0

Vladimir Nabokov
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I rather would entreat thy company; To see the wonders of the world abroad, Than, living dully sluggardized at home, Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness. Votes: 0

William Shakespeare
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Sadly, many in our world today encourage idleness, especially in the form of mindless, inane entertainment that is on the Internet, on television, and in computer games. Votes: 0

Joseph B. Wirthlin
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Till I see money spent on the betterment of man instead of on his idleness and destruction, I shall not believe in any perfect form of government ... Votes: 0

Margot Asquith
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All sin is selfish, whether it be lying, cheating, stealing, immorality, covetousness, or idleness. Sin is for one's own ends, not for another's-certainly not for the Lord's ends. Votes: 0

Derek A. Cuthbert
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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 ... Votes: 0

Margaret Oliphant
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It has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness. Votes: 0

Edward Gibbon
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There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully. Votes: 0

Charlotte Bronte
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There is no remedy for time misspent; No healing for the waste of idleness, Whose very languor is a punishment Heavier than active souls can feel or guess. Votes: 0

Sir Aubrey de Vere, 2nd Baronet
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So long as idleness is quite shut out from our lives, all the sins of wantonness, softness, and effeminacy are prevented; and there is but little room for temptation. Votes: 0

Jeremy Taylor
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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. Votes: 0

Luc de Clapiers
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Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Votes: 0

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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If your passion does not keep you sleepless, you can't be a good beginner. When passion itches, a great hand scratches... Wake up, it's your time to rise above idleness! Votes: 0

Israelmore Ayivor
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Let no one go hungry away. If any of the kind of people should be in want of corn, supply their necessities, provided it does not encourage them in idleness. Votes: 0

George Washington
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Slavery...dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man. Votes: 0

Alexis de Tocqueville
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It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness. Votes: 0

George Borrow
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The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes. Votes: 0

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books Votes: 0

Robertson Davies
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It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless. Votes: 0

Immanuel Kant
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They call it "business" because it does not become successful by a person's "idleness". Go get busy if you want to do business; but be busy for the right reasons! Votes: 0

Israelmore Ayivor
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It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness. Votes: 0

George Henry Borrow
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A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of the past, may be justly reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed. Votes: 0

Samuel Johnson
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Bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. Votes: 0

Karl Marx
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I should like to know for what reason idleness is so popular with many young people that it is impossible to dissuade them from it either by words or by chastisements. Votes: 0

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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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. Votes: 0

Samuel Johnson
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Who-only let him be a man and intent upon honor-is not eager for the honorable ordeal and prompt to assume perilous duties? To what energetic man is not idleness a punishment? Votes: 0

Seneca the Younger
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In the matter of piety, poverty serves us better than wealth, and work better than idleness, especially since wealth becomes an obstacle even for those who do not devote themselves to it. Votes: 0

Saint John Chrysostom
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Life is best enjoyed when time periods are evenly divided between labor, sleep, and recreation...all people should spend one-third of their time in recreation which is rebuilding, voluntary activity, never idleness. Votes: 0

Brigham Young
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Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all. Votes: 0

Rose Macaulay
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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. Votes: 0

Charles Spurgeon
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The greatest defect of common education is, that we are in the habit of putting pleasure all on one side, and weariness on the other; all weariness in study, all pleasure in idleness. Votes: 0

Francois Fenelon
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It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others' expense. Votes: 0

Anton Chekhov
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Simplifying our lives does not mean sinking into idleness, but on the contrary, getting rid of the most subtle aspect of laziness: the one which makes us take on thousands of less important activities. Votes: 0

Matthieu Ricard
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They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us. Votes: 0

Horace
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A few days of idleness have completely sickened me, and given me what is called the blue-devils so severely, that I feel that the sooner I go to work and drive them off, the better. Votes: 0

John James Audubon
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No man can perform so little as not to have reason to congratulate himself on his merits, when he beholds the multitude that live in total idleness, and have never yet endeavoured to be useful. Votes: 0

Samuel Johnson
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The idea of passing one's whole life in moral idleness, and having one's hardest work and duty done by another-whether God or man-is most revolting to us, as it is most degrading to human dignity. Votes: 0

H. P. Blavatsky
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There are two types of patience. One is exercised in hard work and the other in idleness. Patience with hard work is the one that moves mountains. Patience in idleness moves nothing, not even cobwebs. Votes: 0

Israelmore Ayivor
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Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme. Votes: 0

Stanislaw Lem
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We are made weak both by idleness and distrust of ourselves. Unfortunate, indeed, is he who suffers from both. If he is a mere individual he becomes nothing; if he is a king he is lost.

Napoleon Bonaparte
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Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Samuel Johnson
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But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.

Henry David Thoreau
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So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.

Pliny the Younger
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We do not lack strength so much as the will to use it; and very often our imagining that things are impossible is nothing but an excuse of our own contriving, to reconcile ourselves to our own idleness.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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He who eats in idleness that which he himself has not earned, steals it; and a capitalist whom the state pays for doing nothing differs little in my eyes from a brigand, who lives at the expense of passers-by.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom.

Omar Khayyam
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The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Locke, whom there is no reason to suspect of being a favorer of idleness or libertinism, has advanced that whoever hopes to employ any part of his time with efficacy and vigor must allow some of it to pass with trifles.

Samuel Johnson
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I am suggesting that we spend a little less time in idleness, in the fruitless pursuit of watching inane and empty television programs. Time so utilized can be put to better advantage, and the consequences will be wonderful.

Gordon B. Hinckley
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Transfer payments discourage the recipients from earning income in the present and from investing in their potential to earn income in the future. People respond to a reduced cost of idleness by choosing to be idle more often.

Robert Higgs
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In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.

Joshua Reynolds
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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
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From its very inaction, idleness ultimately becomes the most active cause of evil; as a palsy is more to be dreaded than a fever. The Turks have a proverb which says that the devil tempts all other men, but that idle men tempt the devil.

Charles Caleb Colton
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Through faith we are restored to paradise and created anew. We have no need of works in order to be righteous; however, in order to avoid idleness and so that the body might be cared for an disciplined, works are done freely to please God.

Martin Luther
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Of all our faults, the one we avow most easily is idleness; we persuade ourselves that it is allied to all the peaceable virtues,and as for the others, that it does not destroy them utterly, but only suspends the exercise of their functions.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.

Stephen Spender
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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
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Time is one thing that can never be retrieved. One may lose and regain friends. One may lose and regain money. Opportunity, once spurned, may come again. But the hours that are lost in idleness can never be brought back to be used in gainful pursuits

Winston Churchill
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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
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The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.

Tom Hodgkinson
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But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,--cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

Anthony Trollope
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Mrs. Jo did not mean the measles, but that more serious malady called love, which is apt to ravage communities, spring and autumn, when winter gayety and summer idleness produce whole bouquets of engagements, and set young people to pairing off like the birds.

Louisa May Alcott
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Ignorance, far more than idleness, is the mother of all the vices; and how recent has been the admission, that knowledge should be the portion of all? The destinies of the future lie in judicious education; an education that must be universal, to be beneficial.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.

Robert Green Ingersoll
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If, in any individual, university training produces a taste for refined idleness, a distaste for sustained effort, a barren intellectual arrogance, or a sense of superfluous aloofness from the world of real men who do the world's real work, then it has harmed that individual.

Theodore Roosevelt
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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
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The complaint, therefore, that all topicks are preoccupied, is nothing more than the murmur of ignorance or idleness, by which some discourage others, and some themselves; the mutability of mankind will always furnish writers with new images, and the luxuriance of fancy may always embellish them with new decorations.

Samuel Johnson
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Today, luxury resides in everything that is becoming rare: communion with nature, silence, meditation, slowness rediscovered, the pleasure of living out of step with others, studious idleness, the enjoyment of the major works of the mind–these are all privileges that cannot be bought because they are literally priceless.

Pascal Bruckner
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