21 Quotes About Idleness (The Good and the Bad)

July 15, 2022

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21 Quotes About Idleness (The Good and the Bad)

Last Modified: July 15, 2022

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We’re living fully saturated lives. Our days are jam-packed with appointments and we’re pulled along by an incessant drive toward doing. We’re constantly bombarded by information. Our minds are cluttered with inner dialogue and our rigid schedules leave no room for downtime. It’s as if idleness has become an endangered relic of the past. The following quotes shed light on this phenomenon and present conflicting views on idleness.

Flâneur Life Team

Flâneur Life is a home and shared resource for those looking to create more personal freedom in their lives. Although there’s no set purpose, here we discuss alternative ways to think, live, learn and work.

Quotes About Idleness Being Positive

“Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.”
Floyd Dell

“Idleness is the parent of psychology.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

“Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.”
Franz Kafka

“What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.”
Nassim Taleb

“The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.”
Oscar Wilde

“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
Albert Camus

“Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”
George MacDonald

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
Virginia Woolf

“Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.”
Søren Kierkegaard

“Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.”
Tom Hodgkinson

Quotes About Idleness Being Negative

“Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind.”
Henry Ford

“Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.”
Voltaire

“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

“Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.”
Philip Stanhope

“Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless.”
Hosea Ballou

“Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel.”
John Quincy Adams

“Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.”
Victor Hugo

“Idleness is many gathered miseries in one name.”
Jean Paul

“Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all Virtues.”
Benjamin Franklin

“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.”
Anne Baxter