Idle Quotes

438 Idle quotes by 328 unique authors

All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at… — Nick Cave
I want to know which idea you're going to kill yourself trying to make successful, not which ideas have crossed your idle mind. — Guy Kawasaki
To carry the spirit of peace into war is a weak and cruel policy. When an extreme case calls for that remedy which is in… — Thomas B. Macaulay
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.... And as to you corpse, I… — Walt Whitman
There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable… — John Ruskin
Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at… — Alexis de Tocqueville
I humbly thank the gods benign, For all the blessings that are mine... The morning drips her dew for me, Noon spreads an opal canopy.… — Robert Loveman
That man is idle who can do something better. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Have we not all, amid life's petty strife, Some pure ideal of a noble life That once seemed possible? Did we not hear The flutter… — Adelaide Anne Procter
Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their… — F. Scott Fitzgerald
On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and… — Oscar Wilde
Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe? — Thomas Carlyle
No man is so idle that he cannot rouse himself just enough to get in the way of a busy person. — Robert Breault
It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever… — William Ernest Henley
When the idle poor become the idle rich, you'll never know just who is who, or which is which. — Yip Harburg
He who would not be idle, let him fall in love. — Unknown Author
Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle. — Samuel Johnson
An idle man's brain is the devil's workshop. — John Bunyan
Our unconscious is like a vast subterranean factory with intricate machinery that is never idle, where work goes on day and night from the time… — Milton Sapirstein
Raking over the past and sifting its dust is an occupation for the idle or the elderly retired. — Armand Hammer
I am capable of being idle. — Alexander McCall Smith
To understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and… — Samuel Johnson
It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement — Ralph Waldo Emerson
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and… — H. L. Mencken
Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of… — Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

Who Wrote These Idle Quotes

328 authors contributed a total of 438 Idle Quotes, led by these top contributors: