Lethargic Quotes & Sayings

No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel kind of lethargic and don't want to run. Actually, it happens a lot. On days like that, I try to think of all kinds of plausible excuses to slough it off. Once, I interviewed the Olympic running Toshihiko Seko, just after he retired from running and became manager of the S&B company team. I asked him, "Does a runner at your level ever feel like you'd rather not run today, like you don't want to run and would rather just sleep in?" He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, "Of course. All the time! — Haruki Murakami

The angry customers must be calmed and controlled while the lethargic employees must be energized. — Susan Benjamin

I don't eat & drink good clean food because I want my body to look more like Taylor Swift's. Actually, I am among a rare breed of humans that knows my worth is not determined by the size of my ass. That said, I eat and drink clean food because I love myself. Besides, when I eat shitty food, I feel like shit. Period. When I eat refined sugar and a bunch of processed foods, my mind gets all foggy and my body feels lethargic.
No thanks! I mean, how am I supposed to change the world for the better feeling like that? — Brooke Hampton

Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing - too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person's capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart remains unfulfilled. — Stephen Covey

To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action. Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. — Eckhart Tolle

Great talents, by the rust of long disuse,
Grow lethargic and shrink from what they were. — Ovid

I wondered, Why would you run with someone else? Why would you choose to share this intense, solitary activity, mile after mile, in sunshine and rain, alone with your thoughts, every step making you leaner, firmer, every mile taking you farther from the lazy, lethargic world? Like writing and eating, I couldn't stand to share my running. It was such a personal thing: a therapeutic punishment, a way to push, push, push myself. — Emma Woolf

Q: Where and when do you do your writing?
A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules ... afternoons are best, but I'm too lethargic for any real regime. When I'm in the flow of something I can do a regular 9 to 5; when I don't know where I'm going with an idea, I'm lucky if I do two hours of productive work. There is nothing more off-putting to a would-be novelist to hear about how so-and-so wakes up at four in the a.m, walks the dog, drinks three liters of black coffee and then writes 3,000 words a day, or that some other asshole only works half an hour every two weeks, does fifty press-ups and stands on his head before and after the "creative moment." I remember reading that kind of stuff in profiles like this and becoming convinced everything I was doing was wrong. What's the American phrase? If it ain't broke ... — Zadie Smith

The people do not complain because they have no voice; do not move because they are lethargic, and you say that they do not suffer because you have not seen their hearts bleed. — Jose Rizal

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate. — F Scott Fitzgerald

We pull on to the road, where our only company are the wandering cattle, who have become commonplace as traffic lights. Lethargic and listless, they look like they've been roaming the roads of Guinea since the dawn of time. And no doubt they will continue to long after we're gone. — Tom Hiddleston

I can be very lazy sometimes. Really lethargic! — Charlie McDermott

Dervish and a girl with limp blond hair were playing a lethargic — Khaled Hosseini

It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand. — Herman Melville

The mornings themselves were becoming bad now as I wandered
about lethargic, following my synthetic sleep, but afternoons were
still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when I'd feel the
horror, like some poisonous fog bank roll in upon my mind, forcing me
into bed. — William Styron

I can't have a big breakfast or a big lunch because I get very lethargic, and then I get really cranky. I eat, but I have to eat small, healthful amounts of food. — Mindy Kaling

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects. — Julio Cortazar

It is no coincidence that some of America's most lethargic industries-steel, footwear, rubber, textiles-are also among the most heavily protected. — Thomas DiLorenzo

So young and so lethargic! As though he had been born to sit and stare like this. Ever since Kiyoaki had confided in him, Shigekuni, who would have been bright and confident, as befitted such an able young man, had undergone a change. Or rather, the friendship between him and Kiyoaki had undergone a strange reversal. For years, each of them had been extremely careful to intrude in no way on the personal life of the other. But now, just three days before, Kiyoaki had suddenly come to him and, like a newly cured patient transmitting his disease to someone else, had passed on to his friend the virus of introspection. It had taken hold so readily that Honda's disposition now seemed a far better host to it than Kiyoaki's. The first major symptom of the disease was a vague sense of apprehension. — Yukio Mishima

I went through a very lethargic period ... I was just sort of getting through every night and every day. — Patty Duke

There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The boy went ahead with the dog, trudging across the sand, maintaining the same lethargic pace. She watched them go. And as she rinsed the sand from the board, she felt restored, somehow lighter. She wanted her old life back, just the two of them, before all the drama. But it wasn't possible. So she'd have to make do with moments like these: perfect and fleeting. — Samantha Wood

When I heard the apartment door open everything felt lethargic, like we were moving underwater, struggling slowly against the weight. The sitting room door opened and Braden walked in, his face so pale and eyes so glazed, that I knew before I even looked at tear-streaked Ellie. I knew what fear felt like when it was pulsing from a person, I knew how grief could thicken the air, how it could slam into your chest and cause pain through your whole body. Your eyes, your head, your arms, your legs, even your gums. — Samantha Young

Ellen drank long and deep from her water bottle and wiped her mouth with her gauntleted arm. "Are you feeling all right, Jack? Your play's flat, all in all. I was hoping to give Seph more of a show."
Jack tested the edge of his blade with his thumb. "Actually, Ellen, I wondered if you were coming down with something. You were downright lethargic. I nearly dozed off once or twice."
"Well, that explains it. You looked like you were asleep."
With that, they threw down their weapons and it dissolved into a wrestling match. In the end they were kissing each other.
It was certainly a different kind of courtship, but there was a chemistry, an understanding, a kinship between Jack and Ellen that Seph envied. — Cinda Williams Chima

Red stimulates and excites your nerves, pulse rate and blood circulation, and lends energy to your entire system. When you are fatigued, lethargic or sluggish for any reason, red has an energizing influence. — Tae Yun Kim

Take a nation, tell the people there is no God, tell them there is nothing beyond the grave, and they will lose heart, lose their morale. They will become such a shiftless, lazy, apathetic, lethargic people that you won't be able to get half of them to work. Many will not be motivated by anything. — Shelton Smith

In spite of this fact, the Western powers have never given sufficient importance to the Muslim world. They have always been inclined to treat it as a big backward and lethargic child. — Aly Khan

What I learned about them, I liked. But it also seemed that the liberal line was not entirely correct, for it was obvious that racial differences went far beyond skin color. It would be difficult to categorize all the distinctions I noticed. In fact, I made no effort to catalogue them at the time, but their differences ranged all the way from physical characteristics to more subtle differences such as extreme aversion for work in cold weather. On cold days, when I felt invigorated, my black co-workers seemed lethargic. — David Duke

I peered around the corner into the main recovery ward. All I could see were surgeons. Surgeons filling out those incessant forms. Surgeons bringing cups of tea and little sandwich triangles to patients. Surgeons laying in a lethargic stupor, recovering from eye surgery. — Lauren Pearce

Phyllis Kaberry's description of an aborigine camp in western Australia is typical: "The Aborigines continually craved for meat, and any man was apt to declare, 'me hungry alonga bingy,' though he had had a good meal of yams and damper a few minutes before. The camp on such occasions became glum, lethargic, and unenthusiastic about dancing. — Richard W. Wrangham

Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren't able to kill themselves until their mood improves - spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call "completed" suicides. — Charles D'Ambrosio

A US study showed that rats exposed to invisible television rays (screen was blackened) for six hours per day became hyperactive and extremely aggressive for about a week, then suddenly become totally lethargic and stopped breeding entirely. — Mark Sisson

It is the reign of Autumn, the height of the Carnival of Decay, the roses have got inflammation in their blushes, an uncanny hectic tinge, through their soft damask. I felt myself like a creeping thing on the verge of destruction, gripped by ruin in the midst of a whole world ready for lethargic sleep. — Knut Hamsun

She sold her hair; she sold her teeth, but it was never enough. The baby became lethargic and ceased to thrive. She called it "wasting fever".
When the baby died no money could be spared for burial, so she sealed him in an orange box weighed down with stones, and slipped him into the river.
That furtive journey in the middle of the night with her dead baby was the moment when she finally accepted defeat, and knew that the inevitable had come. She and the children would have to go to the workhouse.". — Jennifer Worth

The men and women of England who abolished slavery, created the educational system, or gave women the vote were not acting on the hypotheses of what the voters wanted. They were afire with faith in what people ought to want and in the end they persuaded their lethargic compatriots to give them enough support to warrant a change. — Geoffrey Vickers

The people are not always well-informed, but is better that they have misconceptions that make them restless than that they be lethargic-for lethargy in the people means death for republics. — Thomas Jefferson

There will be no fear of your becoming lethargic if you are continually familiar with internal realities. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

lethargic meliorist; — Julian Barnes

Mrs. Bostwick's face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction. — John Edward Williams

You looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people. — Sylvia Plath

The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events. — Ludwig Von Mises

There is nothing more abominable than being in a state of bodily exhaustion and mental irritation; I was too lethargic to get up and seek some means of occupying my mind, but I was too uneasy to fall asleep. — Elizabeth Peters

every day. Two weeks ago the Boones came down with a summer flu. They had fevers, were lethargic, and had no appetite. — Brad Manuel

Grounding is not dull and lifeless, but dynamic and vibrant. Generally it is our tension that makes us lethargic, and tension results from alienation between various parts of ourselves. As these parts are simplified and integrated, we experience increased vitality. — Anodea Judith

The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. — Edward Gibbon

Dinners at Stony Cross Park were famously lavish, and this one was no exception. Eight courses of fish, game, poultry, and beef were served, accompanied by fresh flower arrangements that were brought to the table with each new remove. They began with turtle soup, broiled salmon with capers, perch and mullet in cream, and succulent Jon Dory fish dressed with a delicate shrimp sauce. The next course consisted of peppered venison, herb-garnished ham, gently fried sweetbreads floating in steaming gravy, and crisp-skinned roast fowl. And so on and so forth, until the guests were stuffed and lethargic, their faces flushed from the constant replenishing of their wineglasses by attentive footmen. The dinner was concluded with a succession of platters filled with almond cheesecakes, lemon puddings, and rice souffles. — Lisa Kleypas

They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough - two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth. — John Fowles

Man was born to live either in a state of distracting inquietude or of lethargic disgust. — Voltaire

The 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. — Mark Steyn

You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken. — William Carlos Williams

Nile perch are enormous but lethargic fish, easy to catch once they have taken your bait. Some are bright golden yellow, some grey pink with the large, round surprised eyes of all fish, in which we humans cannot read any expression of pain or suffering, so that, as with insects or mollusks, we feel absolved of their deaths. — Kuki Gallmann