This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Grief is a species of idleness." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"Idleness leads to relaxation, sooner or later bringing about ideological and material corruption, accompanied by lack of discipline, anarchy, chaos and defeat." - Samora Machel, fully Samora Moisés Machel
"I have never considered that when men have gained their liberty they have the right to live in idleness and create disorder." - François Dominique Toussaint-L’Ouverture
"Life does not agree with philosophy: there is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable." - Anton Chekhov, fully Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
"Labor builds up strength, but long idleness destroys it... Labor often dries the tear and brings happiness." - Cato the Elder, Marcus Porius Cato, aka Censorius (the Censor), Sapiens (the Wise), Priscus (the Ancient) NULL
"Idleness is the root of all evil." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
"Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss, the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil." - Charles Caleb Colton
"From its very inaction, idleness ultimately becomes the most active cause of evil; as a palsy is more to be dreaded than a fever. The Turks have a proverb, which says, "That the devil tempts all other men, but the idle men tempt the devil."" - Charles Caleb Colton
"Idleness is the key of beggary, and the root of all evil." - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
"Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever." - Edmund Burke
"Idleness is the badge of the gentry, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the stepmother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active, and, if it is not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy." - Edmund Burke
"Idleness is the beginning of all vices, the crown of all virtues." - Franz Kafka
"Leisure, though the propertied classes give its name to their own idleness, is not idleness. It is not even a luxury: it is a necessity, and a necessity of the first importance. Some of the most valuable work done in the world has been done at leisure, and never paid for in cash or kind. Leisure any be described as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes: labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation." - George Bernard Shaw
"Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace." - Hesiod NULL
"In mortals there is a care for trifles which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from thought, which is most noble, and a gravity proceeding from dullness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base." - John Ruskin
"There is a care for trifles which proceeds from love of conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base." - John Ruskin
"Idleness is the only refuge of weak minds, and the holiday of fools." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were a man ever so benighted, or forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in him who actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone is there perpetual despair." - Norman Vincent Peale
"There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness." - Robert Burton
"Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading. " - Saint Benedict of Nursia NULL
"The Divine Presence does not dwell in the midst of idleness, sadness, jocularity, levity or idle chatter, but rather in the joy derived from a virtuous deed." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"There is always hope in a man who actually and earnestly works. In idleness alone is there perpetual despair." - Thomas Carlyle
"In idleness there is perpetual despair." - Thomas Carlyle
"Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness." - Thomas Carlyle
"Envy and Idleness married together, begot Curiosity." - Thomas Fuller
"Calumny, the immortal daughter of self-love and idleness." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"What a convenient and delightful world is this world of books! - If you bring to it not the obligation of the student, or look upon it as an opiate for idleness, but enter it rather with the enthusiasm of the adventurer!" - David Grayson, pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker
"Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything." - Floyd Dell
"Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace. " - Hesiod NULL
"The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. " -
"The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go without altogether, so that they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. " - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"According to the biblical tradition the absence of work -- idleness -- was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men -- the military class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of military service, and it always will." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"The superstition that all our hours of work are a minus quantity in the happiness of life, and all the hours of idleness are plus ones, is a most ludicrous and pernicious doctrine, and its greatest support comes from our not taking sufficient trouble, not making a real effort, to make work as near pleasure as it can be." - Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour
"Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"We are made weak both by idleness and distrust of ourselves. Unfortunate, indeed, is he who suffers from both. If he is a mere individual he becomes nothing; if he is a king he is lost." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"Give me the boy who rouses when he is praised, who profits when he is encouraged and who cries when he is defeated. Such a boy will be fired by ambition; he will be stung by reproach, and animated by preference; never shall I apprehend any bad consequences from idleness in such a boy." - Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
"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 profiteth others and ourselves." - Richard Baxter
"Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic." - Robertson Davies
"For idleness is an appendix to nobility." - Robert Burton
"Faith is the door to mysteries. What the bodily eyes are to sensory objects, faith is to the eyes of the intellect that gaze at hidden treasures." - Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
"One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"The public pleasures of far the greater part of mankind are counterfeit. Very few carry their philosophy to places of diversion, or are very careful to analyze their enjoyments. The general condition of life is so full of misery, that we are glad to catch delight without inquiring whence it comes, or by what power it is bestowed." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"There is no observation more frequently made by such as employ themselves in surveying the conduct of mankind, than that marriage, though the dictate of nature, and the institution of Providence, is yet very often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance or caution hath withheld from it." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant and which is animated only by Faith and Hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"I passed close to the pterodactyl swamp, and as I did so, with a dry, crisp, leathery rattle of wings, one of these great creatures--it was twenty feet at least from tip to tip--rose up from somewhere near me and soared into the air. As it passed across the face of the moon the light shone clearly through the membranous wings, and it looked like a flying skeleton against the white, tropical radiance." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo