Idle Quotes
Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level.
When I am idle and shiftless, my affairs become confused; when I work, I get results ... not great results, but enough to encourage me.
I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.
Be not diverted from your duty by any idle reflections the silly world may make upon you, for their censures are not in your power and should not be at all your concerns.
If you create you will also wait, and while you're waiting you will want to be patient but not idle... responses from the world often take a long time.
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
Soup simmering, music of idle gossip, yammering kids, domestic chaos - long adjusted to this rolling scene, you show them your lofty calm.
A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been.
There is really nothing left to a genuine idle man, who possesses any considerable degree of vital power, but sin.
The idle man stands outside of God's plan, outside of the ordained scheme of things; and the truest self-respect, the noblest independence, and the most genuine dignity, are not to be found there.
I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate.
Silence holds the door against the strife of tongue and all the impertinences of idle conversation.
He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.
Besides all this, if you are idle, and take to bad courses, you will hurt those of your brethren who are slaves, and do all in your power to prevent their being free.
A Bradypus or Sloth am I, / I live a life of ease, / Contented not to do or die / But idle as I please.
The dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time.
Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life.
If from poetry we expect a succession of signals for the release of miscellaneous private emotion we are likely to find Tears, Idle Tears valuable.
The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy, at a great price, bad wine made in Boston.
We cannot afford to be idle, and though weaker than our opponents in men and military equipments, must endeavor to harass, if we cannot destroy them.
It is easy for a man who sits idle at home, and has nobody to please but himself, to ridicule or censure the common practices of mankind.
Conjecture as to things useful, is good; but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, is very idle.
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.
Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of complicated state of mind. The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.
If you love an addle egg as well as you love an idle head, you would eat chickens i' th' shell.
O, my lord, You said that idle weeds are fast in growth: The prince my brother hath outgrown me far.
True, I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.
There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, For I am armed so strong in honesty That they pass by me as the idle wind
When the idle poor, Become the idle rich, You'll never know, Just who is who, Or who is which.
There is no substitute under the heavens for productive labor. It is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic achievements.
It is in vain to hope to guard against events too mighty for human foresight or precaution, and it would be idle to object to a government because it could not perform impossibilities.
And, indeed, I will at this point ask an idle question on my own account: which is better — cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?
And he who lives a hundred years, idle and weak, a life of one day is better if a man has attained firm strength.
I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right.