Quotes · Skopia

16 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Idleness✕clear

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

Albert Einstein

1930

★ 4.6

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

Jerome K. Jerome

1886

★ 3.5

Mr. Coolidge's genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is far from being an indolent activity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly. Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, with such a force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task.

Walter Lippmann

1927

★ 3.4

Autobiography and memoir

When men are employ'd, they are best content'd; for on the days they worked they were good-natur'd and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good day's work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome.

Benjamin Franklin

Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin · 1790

★ 2.9

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never led to good intention's goal.

Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote · 1615

★ 2.2

We would all be idle if we could.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D · 1776

★ 2.1

Philosophical literature

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.

Soren Kierkegaard

1843

★ 2.1

For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do.

Against Idleness and Mischief · 1715

★ 1.9

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble... a life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.

Past and Present · 1843

★ 1.9

There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.

1843

★ 1.9

Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.

Retirement · 1782

★ 1.9

Religious literature

Whether we consider the manual industry of the poor, or the intellectual exertions of the superior classes, we shall find that diligent occupation, if not criminally perverted from its end, is at once the instrument of virtue and the secret of happiness. Man cannot be safely trusted with a life of leisure.

1813

★ 1.9

Personal journal

I am happiest when I am idle. I could live for months without performing any kind of labour, and at the expiration of that time I should feel fresh and vigorous enough to go right on in the same way for numerous more months.

1867

★ 1.8

Life is short. Work is for those who will never be able to understand life. Idleness cannot degrade a man. To the discriminating eye it differs from laziness.

1921

★ 1.8

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

Theodore Roosevelt

1899

★ 1.3

Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

George MacDonald

Wilfrid Cumbermede · 1872

★ 1.0