Idleness Quotes
|
Grief is a species of idleness.
|
More Idleness Quotes
Let us give to our republic a fourth power with authority over the youth, the hearts of men, public spirit, habits, and republican morality. Let us establish this Areopagus to watch over the education of the children, to supervise national education, to purify whatever may be corrupt in the republic, to denounce ingratitude, coldness in the country's service, egotism, sloth, idleness, and to pass judgment upon the first signs of corruption and pernicious example.
simón bolívar— As quoted in Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of their Liberators (1918) by William Spence Robertson, p. 239
The haggardness of poverty is everywhere seen contrasted with the sleekness of wealth, the exhorted labour of some compensating for the idleness of others, wretched hovels by the side of stately colonnades, the rags of indigence blended with the ensigns of opulence; in a word, the most useless profusion in the midst of the most urgent wants.
jean-baptiste say— Introduction, p. l
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.
Herman Melville— 1849 Mardi, ch.63.
She marked thee there, 662 Stretched on the rack of a too easy chair, And heard thy everlasting yawn confess The pains and penalties of idleness.
Alexander Pope— 1742 The Dunciad, bk.4, l.341-4.
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of a deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Robert Louis Stevenson— 1881Virginibus Puerisque,'An Apology for Idlers'.
Let him look to it, who is pleased with the game of Tarocco, that the only signification of this word Tarocco, is stupid, foolish, simple, fit only to be used by Bakers, Coblers, and the vulgar, to play at most for the fourth part of a Carlino, at Tarocchi, or at Trionfi, or any Sminckiate whatever: which in every way signifies only foolery and idleness, feasting the eye with the Sun, and the Moon, and the twelve (signs) as children do.
— Mention made on the Tarocchi in his Capitolo del Gioco della Primiera col Comento di messer Pietropaulo da San Chirico (1526).
The worst idleness is that of the heart. Think of the condition and prospects of a voiceless, thankless, prayerless heart.
elias lyman magoo— P. 346. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
Now the code of life of the High Middle Ages said something entirely opposite to this: that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work's sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanatacism should take its rise from the absence of a will to accomplish something.
josef pieper— p. 27 (Leisure, the Basis of Culture)
A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Robert Louis Stevenson— An Apology for Idlers.
Poverty is the reward of idleness.
— Strauss, Emanuel (1994). "267". Dictionary of European Proverbs. I. Routledge. p. 252.
A day Spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
william wordsworth— Bk. IV, l. 377.
Let us be thankful to Adam our benefactor. He cut us out of the 'blessing' of idleness and won for us the 'curse' of labor.
mark twain— Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (1897)
For idleness is an appendix to nobility.
robert burton— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I, Section II. Memb. 2. Subsect. 6.
What heart can think, or tongue express, The harm that groweth of idleness?
— John Heywood, "Idleness" (circa 1576), as reproduced in Samuel Orchart Beeton and William Michael Rossetti, Encyclopaedia of English and American Poetry, Vol. 1 (1873), No. 400.
The frivolous work of polished idleness.
— Sir James Mackintosh, Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, Remarks on Thomas Brown.
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.
— Sir Aubrey de Vere, A Song of Faith, Devout Exercises, and Sonnets.
Worldlings revelling in the fields Of strenuous idleness.
william wordsworth— William Wordsworth, This Lawn, a Carpet all alive.
There is, however, nothing wanting to the idleness of a philosopher but a better name, and that meditation, conversation, and reading should be called “work.”
— Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688), "Du mérite personnel", Aphorism 12
There is no more fatal obstacle to efficiency than the revelation that idleness has the same privileges as industry, and that for every additional blow with the pick or hammer an additional profit will be distributed among shareholders who wield neither.
— R. H. Tawney (1920) The Acquisitive Society. p.81
Saint-Simon leaves a legacy which affects all socialisms, for he introduces into social theory (he theme of idleness and parasitism as social problems consequent on the evasion of the central social responsibility ascribed to citizens: the duty to be productive .
— Peter Beilharz, in Labour's Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (1992).
Alternate translation: Nothing is so certain as that the evils of idleness can be shaken off by hard work. (translator unknown).
— Letter LXI: On meeting death cheerfully, line 2.
Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.
— Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to his Son. Dec. 26, 1749.
Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.
Robert Louis Stevenson— 1881Virginibus Puerisque,'Virginibus Puerisque', pt.2.
The invariable sign of doctrines invented by men is confusion, contradiction, absurdity, and obscenity idleness, theft, and viciousness dishonor your mother who in pain bore you.
mark rosenfelder— Some of the original tenets in Jippirasti, another Almean religion
idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.
stanhope, philip, 4th earl of chesterfield— July 20, 1749.
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".
samuel laman blanchard— "Dolce far Niente", Stanza 4, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
The true goal of the bourgeois life, in other words, is not self-enactment, but diversion. Most people need the organised distraction of work (if they can find it). idleness - the life of the playboy who doesn't answer the phone - is simply too demanding.
john n. gray— "A difficult business," New Statesman (2009-04-16)
idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
cesare pavese— 1938-12-10
There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work . Be he never so benighted and forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone is there perpetual Despair.
albert pike— Ch. XXII : Knight of the Royal Axe, or Prince of Libanus, p. 341
