You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip.
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.
The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. [Matthew 9:37]
— Bible
Expect poison from standing water.
Idleness is an appendix to nobility.
Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
The life of ease is a difficult pursuit.
Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.
That man is idle who can do something better.
Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright.
Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.
Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.
I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
The way to be nothing is to do nothing.
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.
Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
It is not the hours we put in on the job, it is what we put into the hours that counts.
There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.
Idleness is many gathered miseries in one name.
The hardest work of all is to do nothing.
— Proverb
He that is doing nothing is seldom in need of helpers.
— Proverb
An idle brain is the devil's workshop.
Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.
Go to the ant, thou sluggard, learn to live, and by her busy ways, reform thy own.
The insupportable labor of doing nothing.
A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.
Prolonged idleness paralyzes initiative.
Millions are idle, but it's comforting to know that most of them have jobs.
Life is mostly froth and bubble. Two things stand like stone: Dodging duty at the double, leaving work alone.
Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them --their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
You've got to make haste while it's still light of day. My godmother used to say, I don't want to rust out, I just want to work out. If you stand still long enough, people will throw dirt on you.
Shun idleness is the rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
— Voltaire
'Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, you have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.