#idleness

Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette. ↗

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#every #every time #excuse #female #idleness

Idleness is the parent of psychology. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#parent #psychology

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#been #care #endeavors #every #every man

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good. ↗

— Soren Kierkegaard

#evil #far #good #idleness #only

I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural. ↗

— Lawrence Durrell

#success #supernatural

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

The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#dreams #expectancy #hope #idleness #life

Idleness does drive me crazy, but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it. ↗

— Karen Allen

#anything #bad #been #crazy #does

We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency. ↗

— Eamon de Valera

#cannot #idleness #inefficiency #waste #we cannot

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