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A man who has no office to go to--I don't care who he is--is a trial of which you can have no conception.

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

Their only labour was to kill the time; And labour dire it is, and weary woe, They sit, they loll, turn o'er some idle rhyme, Then, rising sudden, to the glass they go, Or saunter forth, with tottering steps and slow.

Indolence is the sleep of the mind.

There is no remedy for time misspent; No healing for the waste of idleness, Whose very languor is a punishment Heavier than active souls can feel or guess.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip.

A nation rushing hastily too and fro, busily employed in idleness.

Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness - the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.

Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.

Evil thoughts often come from idleness.

I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention -- invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

It is not the hours we put in on the job, it is what we put into the hours that counts.

Idleness is many gathered miseries in one name.

The hardest work of all is to do nothing.

Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.