Quotes & Sayings About Indolence

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

Photography works upon the human eye: what is seen is reflected in the brain without the need for complicated thought. In this way the bourgeoisie takes advantage of the mental indolence of the masses and does good business as well. — Willi Munzenberg

There is no moment like the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards: they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence. — Maria Edgeworth

I created my own party. It's called the Sloth and Indolence Party, and I'm running as an anarchist candidate in the best sense of that word. I've studied the presidency carefully. — Utah Phillips

They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams. — James Salter

When you and I are inclined to nestle down in indolence and self indulgence. God "stirs up our nests" and bids us fly upward. — Theodore L. Cuyler

Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries. — Tom Hodgkinson

It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology. — David Riesman

O ye whose years unfolding fair Are fresh with youth, and free from care, Should vice and indolence desire The garden of your souls to hire, No parleys hold-reject the suit, Nor let one seed the soil pollute. My child their first approach beware, With firmness break the insidious snare, Lest as the acorns grew and throve Into a sun-encircled grove, Thy sins, a dark o'ershadowing tree Shut out the light of Heaven from thee. — Lydia Sigourney

Indolence is the worst enemy that the church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar, stretching themselves on beds of ease, or sit idly with folded hands looking lazily out on fields white for the harvest, but where no sickle rings against the wheat. — Frederic Dan Huntington

Those who, either from their own engagements and hurry of business, or from indolence, or from conceit and vanity, have neglected looking out of themselves, as far as my experience and observation reach, have from that time not only ceased to advance, and improve in their performances, but have gone backward. They may be compared to men who have lived upon their principal, till they are reduced to beggary, and left without resources. — Joshua Reynolds

Indolence is the sleep of the mind. — Luc De Clapiers

Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, 'On the Knowledge of Character' (1822) — Alan Bennett

More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all--in order to become the public: that abstract whole formed in the most ludicrous way, by all participants becoming a third party (an onlooker). — Soren Kierkegaard

I was hoping Betsy Nash would disappear. Literally. She was so insubstantial, I could imagine her slowly evaporating, leaving only a sticky spot on the edge of the sofa. But she lingered, eyes darting between me and her husband before we even began speaking. Like she was winding up for the conversation. The children, too, hovered about, little blonde ghosts trapped in a limbo between indolence and stupidity. The pretty girl might do all right. But the piggy middle child, who now waddled dazedly into the room, was destined for needy sex and snack-cake bingeing. The boy was the type who'd end up drinking in gas-station parking lots. The kind of angry, bored kid I saw on my way into town. — Gillian Flynn

We must limit the running to and fro which most men practise, rambling about houses, theatres, and marketplaces. They mind other men's business, and always seem as though they themselves had something to do. If you ask one of them as he comes out of his own door, "Whither are you going?" he will answer, "By Hercules, I do not know: but I shall see some people and do something." They wander purposelessly seeking for something to do, and do, not what they have made up their minds to do, but what has casually fallen in their way. They move uselessly and without any plan, just like ants crawling over bushes, which creep up to the top and then down to the bottom again without gaining anything. Many men spend their lives in exactly the same fashion, which one may call a state of restless indolence. — Seneca.

Ill-humour resembles indolence: it is
natural to us; but if once we have courage to exert ourselves, we find our work run fresh from our hands, and we experience in the activity from which we shrank a real enjoyment. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Illiteracy and stupidity are not quite different statuses; they are both the outcome of our lethargy and indolence. — M.F. Moonzajer

Mental indolence is one of the commonest of human traits — Anonymous

The Church has never been a scapegoat more than it is today. But one must see the symbolic value of this: whatever the Church may have lost by its compromises with the world, its enemies now give back by obliging it to play the same role as Christ. This is its true vocation. And now that it has been reaffirmed, it will enable the Church to shake off the indolence and decadence of the age that is now drawing to a close. MSB — Rene Girard

Mercenariness, pride, routine, and indolence are the capital sins of the Russian office-holder, and the first has so strong a hold upon him that the people say, "To make yourself understood by him you must talk of rubles;" adding that in Russia everybody robs but Christ, who cannot because his hands are nailed down. — Emilia Pardo Bazan

Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind. — H.G.Wells

Discourtesy does not spring merely from one bad quality, but from several
from foolish vanity, from ignorance of what is due to others, from indolence, from stupidity, from distraction of thought, from contempt of others, from jealousy. — Jean De La Bruyere

A people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it. They are more or less unfit for liberty; and although it may be for their good to have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it — John Stuart Mill

Eating constitutes the greatest obstacle to self-control; it gives rise to indolence. — Mahavira

Clemency, which we make a virtue of, proceeds sometimes from vanity, sometimes from indolence, often from fear, and almost always from a mixture of all three. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle; for the calamities of life, like the necessities of Nature, are calls to labor and diligence. — Samuel Johnson

My passion was dead. For years it had rolled over and submerged me; now I felt empty. But that wasn't the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn't look at it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Constantly worried about what I've got Distracted by work but I can't make it stop and my confidence on and my confidence off And I sink to the bottom I rise to the top and I think to myself that I do this a lot World outside just goes it goes it goes it goes it goes it goes . . . - THE AVETT BROTHERS, "TALK ON INDOLENCE — Colleen Hoover

A sloppy half-Windsor is the first symptom of serial indolence' she replied in the patronizing voice that Yellows reserved for Rule-breakers, 'and ignoring the infraction gives the impression that it is acceptable to be inappropriately attired. The next day it might be badly polished shoes, then uncouth language, showing off and impoliteness. Before one knows it, the rot of disharmony would start to dismantle everything that we know and cherish. — Jasper Fforde

Comfort and indolence are cronies. — Thomas Hood

It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient. — W. H. Auden

The love of indolence is universal, or next to it. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Somewhere in the wide range of activity between the hard physical effort of wading for long hours against a swift current in a rocky stream, casting steadily, and the indolence of lying quietly in the sun waiting for a bobber to go under there is a type of angling to suit everyone's mood and everyone's pocketbook. Fishing is fishing wherever it is found ... Angling's problems are never solved. — Lee Wulff

Had they nothing else to say to each other? Yet their eyes were full of more serious statements; and while they sought for commonplace sentences, they each felt the same languor. It was like a murmur of the soul, profound and continuous, dominating that of the voices. Surprised at this unexpected sweetness, it did not occur to them to discuss the sensation or discover the cause. Future happiness, like tropical shores, projects over the vastness that precedes it, its innate indolence, and wafts a scented breeze that intoxicates and dispels any anxiety about the unseen horizon. — F Scott Fitzgerald

That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves — C. G. Jung

To will the impossible is usually a sin of indolence. — Fanny Lewald

What precipices are sloth and pleasure! To do nothing is a sorry resolve to take; are you aware of that? To live in indolence on the goods of others, to be useless, that is to say, injurious! This leads straight to the depths of misery. Woe to the man who would be a parasite! He will become vermin! Ah, it does not please you to work! Ah, you have but one thought
to drink well, to eat well, and sleep well. You will drink water; you will eat black bread; you will sleep on a plank, with fetters riveted to your limbs, and you will feel their cold touch at night on your flesh! — Victor Hugo

One of the great tragedies we witness almost daily is the tragedy of men of high aim and low achievement. Their motives are noble. Their proclaimed ambition is praiseworthy. Their capacity to achieve is great. But their discipline is weak. They succumb to indolence. Appetite robs them of will. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent. — Plato

Not indolence but congenial work is man's Divinely allotted portion. — Joseph Hertz

Indolence, languid as it is, often masters both passions and virtues. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We understand and recognize what is good, but we do not labor to bring it to fulfillment, some of us out of laziness, some because we put something else, some pleasure, before virtue
and there are many pleasures in life, long conversations and indolence-that pleasing vice.. — Euripides

abundance proffered too soon led to lassitude and indolence, a wandering dissatisfaction. — Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Indolence is the dry rot of even a good mind and a good character; the practical uselessness of both. It is the waste of what might be a happy and useful life. — Tryon Edwards

It should seem that indolence itself would incline a person to be honest, as it requires infinitely greater pains and contrivance to be a knave. — William Shenstone

Twas doing nothing was his curse. Is there a vice can plague us worse? — Hannah More

Venerate four characters: the sanguine who has checked volatility and the rage for pleasure; the choleric who has subdued passion and pride; the phlegmatic emerged from indolence; and the melancholy who has dismissed avarice, suspicion and asperity. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

In every generation there have been matters which the general public is irresistibly tempted to ignore, partly through actual lack of information, but far more through indolence, or even through active dislike of inconvenient facts. In such cases, Parliament and Press are often under the subtlest temptations of all, and bear the heaviest guilt for their neglect of the common weal. In times of dangerous self-complacency, a nuisance may be most useful: indeed, it may become useful in proportion to its crying insistence. — George G. Coulton

Other men have acquired fame by industry, but this man by indolence. — Tacitus

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side. — Elizabeth Goudge

We grow old more through indolence, than through age. — Christina, Queen Of Sweden

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

Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence ... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play. — Jean Cocteau

The secret of the whole matter is that a habit is not the mere tendency to repeat a certain act, nor is it established by the mere repetition of the act. Habit is a fixed tendency to react or respond in a certain way to a given stimulus; and the formation of habit always involves the two elements, the stimulus and the response or reaction. The indolent lad goes to school not in response to any stimulus in the school itself, but to the pressure of his father's will; when that stimulus is absent, the reaction as a matter of course does not occur. — Edward O. Sisson

Good and evil exist in all of us.
a moment's temptation takes us on a wrong path.
On that path may lurk foul fiends,
inhuman, yet feeding, needing
all our weaknesses: vanity, indolence and envy,
Easy fruits for evil appetites,
our flesh, a tasty afterthought,
our bones flung asunder. — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

[I]t must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook. — David Hume

This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. — Henry David Thoreau

Guessing is a weakness brought on by indolence and should never be confused with intuition. — Laurie R. King

It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence. — Tom Stoppard

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor. — Edward Gibbon

Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients; action, pleasure and indolence. And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure the relish of the whole composition. — David Hume

Everybody was up to something, especially, of course, those who were up to nothing. — Noel Coward

Employment, which Galen calls 'Nature's Physician,' is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery. — Robert A. Burton

Indolence is stagnation; employment is life. — Seneca The Younger

The town of L - represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquility that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose. — Thomas De Quincey

There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force. — A.J. Muste

I decided I would teach Mrs. P. a lesson by cooking my own meal. — Paul Murray

... the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.
From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781, on Alexander Pope — Samuel Johnson

Gone are the days when the upper classes were terrified of the angry mob wanting to smash their skulls and confiscate their properties. Now their biggest enemy is the army of lazy bums, whose lifestyle of indolence and hedonism, financed by crippling taxes on the rich, is sucking the lifeblood out of the economy. — Ha-Joon Chang

To live in the world of creation - to get into it and stay in it - to frequent it and haunt it - to think intently and fruitfully - to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation - this is the only thing - and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indolence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I can vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine. — Henry James

The income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred, is an instrument of vengeance and plays right into the hands of the communists. It employs the vicious communist principle of taking from each according to his accumulation of the fruits of his labor and giving to others according to their needs, regardless of whether those needs are the result of indolence, or lack of pride, self-respect, personal dignity or other attributes of men. — T. Coleman Andrews

A man governs himself by the dictates of virtue and good sense, who acts without zeal or passion in points that are of no consequence; but when the whole community is shaken, and the safety of the public endangered, the appearance of a philosophical or an affected indolence must arise either from stupidity or perfidiousness. — Joseph Addison

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return. — Franz Kafka

Achievement of any kind is the crown of effort,the diadem of thought.By the aid of self-control, resolution, purity, righteousness, and well-directed thought a man ascends.By the aid of animality,indolence,impurity,corruption,and confusion of thought a man descends. — James Allen

It is indolence ... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine. — Jane Austen

The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts, but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject. I love to amuse myself with trifles, by beginning a hundred things and never finishing one of them, by going or coming as I take either into my head, by changing my project at every instant, by following a fly through all its windings, in wishing to overturn a rock to see what is under it, by undertaking with ardor the work of ten years, and abandoning it without regret at the end of ten minutes; finally, in musing from morning until night without order or coherence, and in following in everything the caprice of a moment. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Time was, I shrank from what was right, From fear of what was wrong; I would not brave the sacred fight, Because the foe was strong. But now I cast that finer sense And sorer shame aside; Such dread of sin was indolence, Such aim at heaven was pride. J. H. NEWMAN. — Mary W. Tileston

It is through madness that we hate an enemy, and think of revenging ourselves; and it is through indolence that we are appeased, and do not revenge ourselves. — Jean De La Bruyere

Contentment is, after all, simply refined indolence. — Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by indolence. — Wayne Koestenbaum

And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious. — David Hume

The avoidance of little evils, little sins, little inconsistencies, little weaknesses, little follies, little indiscretions and imprudences, little foibles, little indulgences of self and of the flesh, little acts of indolence or indecision, or slovenliness or cowardice, little equivocations or aberrations from high integrity, little touches of shabbiness or meanness ... little indifferences to the feelings or wishes of others, little outbreaks of temper, or crossness, or selfishness, or vanity - the avoidance of such little things as these goes far to make up at least the negative beauty of a holy life. — Horatius Bonar

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work. — Grace Paley

God's prayer-line is not a wheel of fortune or lottery for the indolent. — Bryant McGill

I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate indolence, oppression, injustice; hate Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them with a deep, living, godlike hatred. — Frederick William Robertson

It is not error which opposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, every thing which favors inaction. — Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot

Many a good intention dies from inattention. If, through carelessness or indolence, or selfishness, a good intention is not put into effect, we have lost an opportunity, demoralized ourselves, and stolen from the pile of possible good. To be born and not fed, is to perish. To launch a ship and neglect it is to lose it. To have a talent and bury it, is to be a "wicked and slothful servant." For in the end we shall be judged, not alone by what we have done, but by what we could have done. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond
Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,
To our bower at the lily root.
Overhead the old umbrellas of summer Wither like pithless hands.
There is little shelter.
Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank
Dominion. The stars are no nearer. Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink The liquor of indolence, and all thing sink Into a soft caul of forgetfulness. The fugitive colors die. Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,
The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like statues.
Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppetmaster
Wear masks of horn to bed. This is not death, it is something safer. The wingy myths won't tug at us anymore: The molts are tongueless that sang from above the water Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,
And how a god flimsy as a baby's finger
Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air. — Sylvia Plath

Flee sloth; for the indolence of the soul is the decay of the body. — Cato The Younger

Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder. — Edward Gibbon

I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times they had called it sprezzatura. The idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one's every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat. — Paul Murray

The sluggard is a living insensible. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence. — Jean Cocteau

You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[I]t is fundamentally false that our search for higher grounds of knowledge, more general truths, springs from the presupposition of an object unconditioned in its being [i.e., Kant's principle of reason], or has anything whatever in common with this. Moreover, how should it be essential to the reason to presuppose something which it must know to be an absurdity as soon as it reflects? The source of that conception of the unconditioned is rather to be found only in the indolence of the individual who wishes by means of it to get rid of all further questions, whether his own or of others, though entirely without justification. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas. — Tom Hodgkinson

The Lord has not redeemed you so you might enjoy pleasures and luxuries or so that you might abandon yourself to ease and indolence, but rather so you should be prepared to endure all sorts of evils. — John Calvin

Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will. You know that as well as I. In this case it was an indolence characterized by a pursuit of knowledge, a frenzied search for answers to everything, no matter the value of such answers. — Steven Erikson

Indolence and stupidity are first cousins. — Antoine Rivarol