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An idle brain is the devil's workshop.
-English Proverb
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A young man idle, an old man needy.
-English Proverb
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Towards evening the lazy person begins to get busy.
-Proverb
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It is better to sit down than to stand, it is better to lie down than to sit, but death is the best of all.
-Proverb
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The hardest work of all is to do nothing.
-Proverb
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He that is doing nothing is seldom in need of helpers.
-Proverb
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By doing nothing we learn to do ill.
-Proverb
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Sloth is the key to poverty.
-Proverb
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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
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The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Matthew 9:37
-Bible
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The sluggard does not plow after the season, so he begs during the harvest and has nothing. Proverbs 20:4
-Bible
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Some men are so lazy they won't even feed themselves.
-Bible
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If a man will not work, he shall not eat.
-Bible
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He also who is slack in his work is brother to him who destroys. Proverbs 18:9
-Bible
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Laziness. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Expect poison from standing water.
-William Blake
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Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared. Leisure has become entertainment.
-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987
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I slip from workaholic to bum real easy.
-Matthew Broderick
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Idleness is an appendix to nobility.
-Robert Burton
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Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
-Mortimer Caplan
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Laziness never arrived at the attainment of a good wish.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive.
-Lord Chesterfield
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I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
-Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977
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Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.
-Jeremy Collier
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A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
-Cyril Connolly
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There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten -- before the end is told -- even if there happens to be any end to it.
-Joseph Conrad
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The life of ease is a difficult pursuit.
-William Cowper
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Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.
-Leonardo DaVinci
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I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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That man is idle who can do something better.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright.
-Benjamin Franklin
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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
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A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.
-Ulysses Simpson Grant
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The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked.
-Napoleon Hill
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You must avoid sloth, that wicked siren.
-Horace
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The way to be nothing is to do nothing.
-Nathaniel Howe
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Lack of pep is often mistaken for patience.
-Kin Hubbard
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A loafer always has the correct time.
-Kin Hubbard
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A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
-Victor Hugo
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It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
-Jerome K. Jerome
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As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.
-Samuel Johnson
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Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.
-Samuel Johnson
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Turn on the prudent ant thy heedful eyes. Observe her labors, sluggard, and be wise.
-Samuel Johnson
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My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fiber all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this sight of faintness -- if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor -- but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.
-John Keats
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Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Prostration is our natural position. A worm-like movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men.
-Percy Wynham Lewis
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It is not the hours we put in on the job, it is what we put into the hours that counts.
-Sidney Madwed
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We seldom call anybody lazy, but such as we reckon inferior to us, and of whom we expect some service.
-Bernard Mandeville
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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
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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
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Idleness is many gathered miseries in one name.
-Jean Paul
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The only menace is inertia.
-St. John Perse
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I'm barely prolific and incredibly lazy.
-Tom Petty
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A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.
-Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason
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Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.
-Jules Renard
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We have so many labor-saving devices today that we go broke keeping them repaired. Everything is easier, but requires greater maintenance.
-Lorne Sanny
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Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.
-Johann G. Seume
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Go to the ant, thou sluggard, learn to live, and by her busy ways, reform thy own.
-Elizabeth Smart
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There is no fatigue so wearisome as that which comes from lack of work.
-C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon
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The insupportable labor of doing nothing.
-Sir Richard Steele
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A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Too many young people itch for what they want without scratching for it.
-Thomas Taylor
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To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
-Henry David Thoreau
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It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.
-James Thurber
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Prolonged idleness paralyzes initiative.
-Source Unknown
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Millions are idle, but it's comforting to know that most of them have jobs.
-Source Unknown
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Life is mostly froth and bubble. Two things stand like stone: Dodging duty at the double, leaving work alone.
-Source Unknown
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Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them --their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
-Source Unknown
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Lazy people are always anxious to be doing something.
-Marquis De Vauvenargues
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The idle always have a mind to do something.
-Marquis De Vauvenargues
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You've got to make haste while it's still light of day. My godmother used to say, I don't want to rust out, I just want to work out. If you stand still long enough, people will throw dirt on you.
-Ben Vereen
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Shun idleness is the rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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'Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, you have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.
-Isaac Watts
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For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
-Isaac Watts, Divine Songs. Song xx.
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Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.
-Richard Weaver
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If you're coasting, you're either losing momentum or else you're headed downhill.
-Joan Welsh
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Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books about Laziness
