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
Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.
Ambrose Bierce
The regime in too many prisons is one of idleness, and locking up someone from such a background in idleness virtually guarantees re-offending. Instead there needs to be a full day's work every weekday in either the workshops or the education department or preferably a mixture of both.
Ann Widdecombe
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 profit others and ourselves.
Anne Baxter
It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.
Anthony Trollope
Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
Anton Chekhov
Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
Benjamin Franklin
Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.
Benjamin Jowett
It would indeed be a sad misfortune if man were released from the necessity of work and struggle, for it is a well-known fact that organs which do not function atrophy; and according to the old saying, 'Idleness is the devil's workshop.'
Charles A. Beard
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency.
Eamon de Valera
Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.
Ezra Cornell
There was a phase when I would just loaf around, doing nothing. It had put my mom under a lot of stress. I knew her stress stemmed from her love for me, yet I never paid attention to her feelings. When it finally hit me that my idleness was taking a toll on her, I was genuinely sad and depressed.
Farhan Akhtar
Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish.
Francois Rabelais
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
Franz Kafka
Idleness is the parent of psychology.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness.
George Borrow
It is rather hard to be accused of shiftlessness and idleness when the accuser closes the avenue of labour and industrial pursuits to us.
George H. White
Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.
Hannah More
Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
Herman Melville
Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.
Toil is no source of shame; idleness is shame.
Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.
When economist William Beveridge dreamed up the postwar welfare state he wanted to fight five 'giant evils' - want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Fast forward 65 years and it seems the last New Labour government grew an Unfair State that fuelled - not fought - one of those evils: idleness.
Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.
Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.
Idleness - a job that you have to go to, but not necessarily do anything - is the poet's friend.
A few days of idleness have completely sickened me, and given me what is called the blue-devils so severely, that I feel that the sooner I go to work and drive them off, the better.
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
Sadly, many in our world today encourage idleness, especially in the form of mindless, inane entertainment that is on the Internet, on television, and in computer games.
Gluttony and idleness are two of life's great joys, but they are not honourable.
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.
Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.
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.
Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.
Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.
The invention of money opened a new field to human avarice by giving rise to usury and the practice of lending money at interest while the owner passes a life of idleness.
Idleness is an appendix to nobility.
I think the man who eats the bread of idleness is under a certain obligation to speak well of labor.
It is idleness that creates impossibilities; and where people don't care to do anything, they shelter themselves under a permission that it cannot be done.
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
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.
It is idleness that is the curse of man - not labour. Idleness eats the heart out of men as of nations, and consumes them as rust does iron.
Idleness of the mind is much worse than that of the body: wit, without employment, is a disease - the rust of the soul, a plague, a hell itself.
Acting is a lot of waiting to be picked, and I like to do a lot of things at once. I think I will have to find things that are totally mine. I have so much comfort that school and my academic life are totally mine. I hope that there's not a lot of idleness in my future.
Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
I was never comfortable with the risk of climbing in the Himalayas, or the amount of time in idleness that is involved in the Everest expedition.
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
