#idleness

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dreams #idleness #our #our dreams #sometimes

Idleness is an appendix to nobility. ↗

— Robert Burton

#idleness #nobility

Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish. ↗

— Francois Rabelais

#idleness #perish #remove #soon #world

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#idle-minds #idleness #suspicion #business

Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#smoking #men

Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it. ↗

— Émile Zola

#idleness #zola #life

If you think of something, do it. Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that. ↗

— Lydia Davis

#depression #idleness #self-sabotage #terror #writer-s-block

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. ↗

— Lord Chesterfield

#every #idleness #know #laziness #moment

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble. ↗

— Agatha Christie

#arises #directly #i #idleness #in my opinion

But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow. ↗

— J.M. Coetzee

#time #freedom