Idle Quotes

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving. (William Shakespeare)
If you are idle, be not solitary if you are solitary, be not idle. View quote
Samuel Johnson
How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe. View quote
John Aubrey
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor. View quote
Victor Hugo
The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently. View quote
Charles Dudley Warner
It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few. View quote
Pythagoras
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. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many in shallows and in miseries, are the decrees of a large, farseeing be. View quote
Herbert Spencer
Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind. View quote
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent. (Samuel Johnson)
It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master. View quote
Francis Fukuyama
Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good. View quote
Thomas à Kempis
How various his employments, whom the world Calls idle and who justly, in return, Esteems that busy world an idler too. View quote
William Cowper
So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation. View quote
Michel de Montaigne
The idle mind knows not what it wants. View quote
Ennius
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle. View quote
Kahlil Gibran
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. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
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. View quote
Frank B. Kellogg
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears. (Barbara Johnson)
If I'm alone too long I think too much, and I'm not interested in doing that. That won't lead anywhere good, I'm sure. If I'm busy I tend to stay out of trouble. An idle mind is the devil's playground. View quote
Lisa Marie Presley
The dangers which threaten us are twofold: First, from the Confederate forces, composed of men whose earnest convictions and reckless bravery it is idle to deny. View quote
Robert Dale Owen
No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. View quote
Samuel Smiles
When the idle poor, Become the idle rich, You'll never know, Just who is who, Or who is which. View quote
Yip Harburg