Idle Quotes
We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.
William Graham Sumner
Thanks be to God. Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.
Samuel Pepys
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
Samuel Johnson
As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.
Benjamin Franklin
It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.
Bryant H. McGill
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.
Jupiter Hammon
Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.
Mahatma Gandhi
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.
Charles Kingsley
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.
Philip Kaufman
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.
Juan Ruiz
Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.
Thomas a Kempis
How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellowes as I put them down.
John Aubrey
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.
Alan Dershowitz
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.
Gustav Klimt
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.
Charles Dudley Warner
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.
Carl Hiaasen
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.
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.
Frank B. Kellogg