Idle Quotes

Besides all this, if you are idle, and take to bad courses, you will hurt those of your brethren who are slaves, and do all in your power to prevent their being free.

Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

Love makes a subtle man out of a crude one, it gives eloquence to the mute, it gives courage the cowardly and makes the idle quick and sharp.

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

Nostalgia often leads to idle speculation.

How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellowes as I put them down.

I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.

Although even when I am being idle I have plenty of food for thought both early and late - thoughts both about and not about art.

Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject.

Idle time is the devil's play.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

Fortunately, something always remains to be harvested. So let us not be idle.

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talks of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

As a Jew I cannot sit idle while genocidal atrocities continue to unfold in Darfur, Sudan.

Beware of the man who will not engage in idle conversation; he is planning to steal your walking stick or water your stock.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.