"Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel"
John Quincy Adams
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent
Samuel Johnson
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
Edmund Burke
Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People that have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.
Jeremy Collier
Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.
Charles Caleb Colton
There is really nothing left to a genuine idle man, who possesses any considerable degree of vital power, but sin.
Josiah Gilbert Holland
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.
Samuel Johnson
If idleness do not produce vice or malevolence, it commonly produces melancholy.
Sydney Smith
He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed.
Socrates
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.
Jeremy Taylor
His labour is a chant, His idleness a tune; Oh, for a bee's experience Of clovers and of noon!
Emily Dickinson
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
I don't think necessity is the mother of invention -- invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
Agatha Christie
Idleness is only fatal to the mediocre.
Albert Camus
To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
Albert Camus