Quotes & Sayings About Idling

I thought of many an autumn I had known: Seemly autumns approaching deliberately, with amplitude. I thought of wild asters, Michaelmas daisies, mushrooms, leaves idling down the air, two or three at a time, warblers twittering and glittering in every bush ('Confusing fall warblers,' Peterson calls them, and how right he is): the lingering yellow jackets feeding on broken apples; crickets; amber-dappled light; great geese barking down from the north; the seesaw noise that blue jays seem to make more often in the fall. Hoarfrost in the morning, cold stars at night. But slow; the whole thing coming slowly. The way it should be. — Elizabeth Enright

What's on the outside to prevent their return? They are now convicted felons, a branding they will never be able to shake. The odds were stacked against them to begin with, and now that they're tagged as felons, life in the free world is somehow supposed to improve? These are the real casualties of our wars. The war on drugs. The war on crime. Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. Our prisons are packed. Our streets are filled with drugs. Who's winning the war? — John Grisham

Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. — Mark Twain

In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. We have learned, mostly from Alfred Adler, that what man needs most is to feel secure in his self-esteem. But man is not just a blind glob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man's natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality. The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself even as it gaspingly dies. — Ernest Becker

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

I turned, going back along the planks toward the idling pick-up without saying anything else. I just wanted to be away from people. I didn't want to have to avoid answering questions about what happened. I didn't want the questions. — Ken Kesey

I like idling when I ought not to be idling; not when it is the only thing I have to do. Thatis my pig-headed nature. The time when I like best to stand with my back to the fire, calculating how much I owe, is when my desk is heaped highest with letters that must be answered by the next post. When I like to dawdle longest over my dinner is when I have a heavy evening's work before me. And if, for some urgent reason, I ought to be up particularly early in the morning, it is then, more than at any other time, that I love to lie an extra half-hour in bed.
Ah! how delicious it is to turn over and go to sleep again: "just for
five minutes." Is there any human being, I wonder, besides the hero of
a Sunday-school "tale for boys," who ever gets up willingly? — Jerome K. Jerome

As for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plane at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top. — Henry David Thoreau

In 2012, I received a phone call from the family of Arsala Rahmani, the Afghan senator with whom I'd become friendly. That morning, a gunman had pulled up alongside Rahmani's vehicle, idling in a crowded intersection, and shot him point blank. — Anand Gopal

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. — Rebecca Solnit

Idling is not my strong suit. — Cam Gigandet

Felicia managed to stagger to her feet, open the front door, and limp haltingly to the white limousine idling on the snowy street outside the house. Murphy went to the window to watch Felicia get into the limo and depart.
"Yeah," I said, deadpan. "The little blond woman has two of them. — Jim Butcher

The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imaging the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.
Which is right?
Neither.
Both.
Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division. — George Saunders

Rhode Island works hard to reduce air pollution in our communities. We passed laws to prohibit cars and buses from idling their engines and to retrofit school buses with diesel pollution controls. But there is only so much a single state can do, particularly against out-of-state pollution. — Sheldon Whitehouse

And then the car was beside him, not idling but panting like a deadly animal which may or may not be tamed. — Stephen King

Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice. — William Hazlitt

She was usually idling by the river bank, or gathering berries in a field when a someone appeared, with gentle and penetrating eyes, who - with no exchange of words - understood; — Toni Morrison

I'm starting to think you like prisons," he says, idling knocking his knuckles against the wall. "And that you have the worst taste in men. — Victoria Aveyard

Patience is idling your motor when you feel like stripping a gear. — Bill Gothard

The pool and the miniature vale that contained it, always dark, grew darker still. Looking up after countless kisses, he saw idling fish of mottled gold and silver, black, white, and red, hanging in air above the goddess's upraised hand, and for the first time noticed light streaming from a lamp of silver filigree in the branches of a stunted tree. "Where did they go?" he asked. — Gene Wolfe

I can never think of the time I spend idling in railway stations as lost; it's a waiting liberated from the three temporal vices of regret, anticipation or boredom, the weak echo of that bliss spent between lifetimes. — Eric Morecambe

The imagination needs moodling,
long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. — Brenda Ueland

Jelly-bean is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular- - I am idling, I have idled, I will idle — F Scott Fitzgerald

life in the free world is somehow supposed to improve? These are the real casualties of our wars. The war on drugs. The war on crime. Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. — John Grisham

That's why it's best not to start the engine on an open throttle from cold (unless the handbook recommends it): immediate revs from cold cause a lot of wear to oil-starved bearings. Starting with a closed throttle allows the oil time to circulate and warm, while the engine is idling, for those crucial first few seconds. — Peter Henshaw

I've always felt a little lost in life, like I never received complete instructions on who I'm supposed to be. Everyone else around me seemed to know exactly who they were. Their lives would fly right by me; their GPS's locked on to destinations while I just sat idling in the street. In high school I never did any extracurricular activities because I couldn't figure out if I was a sports person or a music person. And it was no different in college. I wandered through four different majors, unable to decide who I wanted to be. I just felt like a blank slate.

And if I was a blank slate, Micah York was The Starry Night - authentic, beautiful, perfect. He was my exact antithesis which is what attracted me to him in the first place. He was born knowing exactly who he was and what he was about. His confidence and certainty in himself was an all but tangible element of him. — C.K. Walker

As for me, I delight in the every day Way Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves Here in the wilderness I am completely free With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever There are roads, but they do not reach the world Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night While a round moon climbs up Cold Mountain — Hanshan

The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures ... They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling. — Allan Bloom

There would be no idling in a co-operative workshop. Each workman, being an employer, has a spur to his own industry, and has a pecuniary reason for being watchful of the industry of his fellow workmen. — Leland Stanford

But here we call it Spring, when a young man's fancy turns,
fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,
to touching in the dark. And the old man's?
To worms in their garden box; stepping aside
a moment in a poem that will remember,
fitfully, who made it and the discord
and stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath
it sprang from. A bending down
lightly to touch the earth. — David Malouf

How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of result — George MacDonald

There are over 2 million cars standing in front of red lights with their engines going. Then we have over 2 million times approximately 100 horsepower being generated as they are idling there, so that we have something like 200 million horses jumping up and down and going nowhere. Now, we have to count that in our economy when we begin to get down to what is the efficiency of the economy. — R. Buckminster Fuller

My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week. — Tom Hodgkinson

Alberta had always had many forms of idling. She frittered away her time with virtuosity. — Cora Sandel

If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling table or gossiping on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and our children go half-fed!" (Buck, 65) — Pearl S. Buck

A local white bootlegger, idling under the store awning, accosted Major Stem. "Why'd you call that damned nigger woman 'Mrs. Shaw'?" he demanded. In those days, white Southerners did not use courtesy titles for their black neighbors. While it was permissible to call a favored black man "Uncle" or "Professor" - a mixture of affection and mockery - he must never hear the words "mister" or "sir." Black women were "girls" until they were old enough to be called "auntie," but they could never hear a white person, regardless of age, address them as "Mrs." or "Miss" or "Ma'am." But Major Stem made his own rules. — Timothy B. Tyson

A uniform cordoned off the area with crime scene tape. The M.E. pulled in and parked. There were two EMT trucks idling at the edge of the lot. I'd stayed close to the back door, and one of the Rangeman guys had taken a position two feet from me, standing at parade rest. No doubt in my mind he'd take a bullet for me rather than face Ranger over a dead Stephanie. — Janet Evanovich

Every day for a week, sitting in my idling car, saying goodbye without saying anything at all - the touch of his hand, his forehead pressed to mine, the way he brushed my hair out of my face, tucking it behind my ear. And still, he hadn't kissed me. Not once. Nothing but that brief brush of his lips. I was beginning to go a little crazy. — Emme Rollins

Ben was in his truck, window down, idling at the curb, dark lenses hiding his eyes from her, looking effortlessly big and badass.
The way she wished she felt. — Jill Shalvis

Instead of putting Americans to work, the Teamsters have been busy yanking members off projects and idling construction projects from California to Indiana to New York in order to shake down employers. — Michelle Malkin

In idling, the motor's running, but you're letting your mind take in anything. Things pop into it. Those are the gifts of subterranean conscious. — Mortimer Adler

So when his tractor came to a smash-halt, the potato-digger rising up behind and then crashing back down, Bob was flung forward over the engine block and directly into the Dome. His iPod exploded in the wide front pocket of his bib overalls, but he never felt it. He broke his neck and fractured his skull on the nothing he collided with and died in the dirt shortly thereafter, by one tall wheel of his tractor, which was still idling. Nothing, you know, runs like a Deere. — Stephen King

There were no other cars on the road. Just the sound of the wind, and the motor idling, and through his open window, the faint clicking sounds of Roger making another mix. I closed my eyes and let the wind whip my hair around my face, letting out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding. — Morgan Matson

What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, nine-to-five type week, or worse. — Tom Hodgkinson

Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. — William Lane Craig

Fine. We can act like we're fuckups idling about. As per our usual. But if we cap a god, I'm telling everyone I know! Two words: Press. Conference. — Kresley Cole

Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise. — J. Maarten Troost

Penny Tweedy took over the running of The Meadow as a businesswoman, with a tough attitude...Behind the Cheer smile and the porcelain sparkle of her teeth, behind the radiance and the friendliness and the warmth--behind all the charm, gentility, and good Episcopalianism--was a mind with a thermostat idling at sixty degrees. — William Nack

It is an unfortunate reality for innate idlers that our modern world requires one to hold a job to maintain a sustainable existence. Idling, I find, if immensely underrated, even vilified by some who see inactivity as the gateway for the Evil One. — J. Maarten Troost

Communities and neighborhoods are affected. Idling trains, traffic backups, grade crossing accidents and other safety issues all affect the quality of life in our neighborhoods. — Bill Lipinski

If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away? — Philip Dormer Stanhope

Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men. — Augustine Of Hippo

Heights - an orange-vested Caltrans crew, stupidest agency in the state, taking petty-fascist satisfaction in blocking off two lanes. I sat, idling along with the Seville, rolled a foot or two, sat some more, finally got past La Cienega. Unmindful of the noise and the dirt. New focus: yearning to feel useful. — Jonathan Kellerman

The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy. — Plato

Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous. Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in "An Apology for Idlers" (1885): "Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class. — Tom Hodgkinson

One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens. — Joshua Foer

A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief. — Upton Sinclair

Idling has always been my strong point. — Jerome K. Jerome

Do not waste time idling or thinking after you have set your goals — Miyamoto Musashi

Like a car idling, I gave of my energy until there was nothing more in my tank to give... all the while going nowhere. — Kate McGahan

Monday ushers in a particularly impressive clientele of red-eyed people properly pressed into dry-cleaned suits in neutral tones. They leave their equally well-buttoned children idling in SUVs while dashing to grab double-Americanos and foamy sweet lattes, before click-clacking hasty escapes in ass-sculpting heels and polished loafers with bowl-shaped haircuts that age every face to 40. My imagination speed evolves their unfortunate offspring from car seat-strapped oxygen-starved fast-blooming locusts, to the knuckle-drag harried downtown troglodytes they'll inevitably become. One by one I capture their flat-formed heads between index finger and thumb for a little crush-crush-crushing, ever aware that if I'm lucky one day their charitable contributions will fund my frown-faced found art project to baffle someone's hallway. — Amanda Sledz

Idling is important. Most people don't know how. They're afraid of it. This explains why they turn on the television set or pick up the newspaper. They think they have to be doing something. — Mortimer Adler