69 Quotes About Idleness (The Good and the Bad)

We’re living fully saturated lives.

Our days are jam-packed with appointments and video meetings. We’re pulled along by an incessant drive toward doing. Information is constantly bombarding us. Our minds are cluttered with inner dialogue.

It’s as if idleness has become an endangered relic of the past (though some would argue that’s a good thing).

That’s why I’ve collected this set of quotes about idleness. They shed light on this phenomenon and present conflicting views on idleness.

Let’s explore.

Quotes About Idleness

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

Friedrich Nietzsche

People are not made to rust out in idleness. A degree of exercise is as necessary for the preservation of health, both of body and mind, as our daily food.  And what exercise is more fitting, or more appropriate of one who is in the decline of life, than that of superintending a well-ordered garden?  What more enlivens the sinking mind? What is more conducive to a long life?

Joseph Breck

From its very inaction, idleness ultimately becomes the most active cause of evil; as a palsy is more to be dreaded than a fever. The Turks have a proverb which says that the devil tempts all other people, but that idle people tempt the devil.

Charles Caleb Colton

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

Oscar Wilde

What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.

Nassim Taleb

Poverty is not dishonorable in itself, but only when it comes from idleness, intemperance, extravagance and folly.

Plutarch

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

Lin Yutang

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

Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless.

Hosea Ballou

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

Idleness is the heaviest of all oppressions.

Victor Hugo

Success operates in active moments and not in idleness.

Oscar Bimpong

Idleness is many gathered miseries in one name.

Jean Paul

Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel.

John Quincy Adams

Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all Virtues.

Benjamin Franklin

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 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

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

Oscar Wilde

Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.

Mahatma Gandhi

Idleness is the only refuge of weak minds, and the holiday of fools.

Lord Chesterfield

Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.

Johann G. Seume

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

Idleness is an appendix to nobility.

Robert Burton

Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright.

Benjamin Franklin

Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

Albert Camus

What heart can think, or tongue express, The harm that groweth of idleness?

John Heywood

The way to be nothing is to do nothing.

Nathaniel Howe

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.

H.L. Mencken

Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.

Philip Stanhope

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

Jerome K. Jerome

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.

Benjamin Franklin

I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.

Sherlock Holmes

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

Floyd Dell

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

Benjamin Franklin

The devil finds work for idle hands.

Henry David Thoreau

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

Khalil Gibranv

That man is idle who can do something better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Woe to those who lead idle lives. Idleness is a dreadful illness and must be cured in childhood. If it is not cured then, it can never be cured.

Carlo Collodi

Painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with the useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed.

Michelangelo

Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak. Antoine de

Saint-Exupery

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

Henry David Thoreau

It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country.

Oscar Wilde

Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.

William E. Barrett

There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

Bill Watterson

In idleness there is a perpetual despair.

Thomas Carlyle

Get busy living or get busy dying.

Stephen King

Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.

Johann Gottfried Seume

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.

Samuel Johnson

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

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness.

Robert Burton

Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended…Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored.

Soren Kierkegaard

The most likely man to go to hell is the man who has nothing to do on earth. tempt the devil to tempt them.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.

Henry Ford

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

Thomas a Kempis

He is idle that might be better employed.

Thomas Fuller

Idleness is the burial of a living man.

Jeremy Taylor

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.

John Lubbock

There is not a thing on the face of the earth that I abhor so much as idleness or idle people.

George Whitefield

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

Lord Chesterfield

Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.

Hannah More

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness – to save oneself trouble.

Agatha Christie

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

Victor Hugo

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing. It’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.

Margaret Thatcher

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

Franz Kafka

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

George Bernard Shaw

Parting Words

As you can see, thoughts are mixed on this topic.

I think it comes down to how we define idleness, where you are in your journey, and how your life trajectory is going. There’s an obvious difference between someone who works 70-hour weeks for their fast-growing startup who takes some downtime to connect the dots and a lazy teenager who has yet to accomplish (or even start) anything significant in their lives.

Idleness has a negative connotation, but ‘strategic idleness’ may be beneficial for some of us.

Which camp are you in? Have any other quotes about idleness you’d add to the list? Let me know in the comments.

P.S. If you liked this, you might also enjoy these related quote collections:

• Quotes About Nonconformity
• Quotes About Online Business Success
• Quotes About Options and Optionality
• Quotes About Goal Setting
• Quotes About Life Direction

Originally Published: September 11, 2019