Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.
Renata Adler

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
Arthur Rimbaud

If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.
Albrecht Durer

If any person wish to be idle, let them fall in love.
Ovid

If I'm alone too long I think too much, and I'm not interested in doing that. That won't lead anywhere good, I'm sure. If I'm busy I tend to stay out of trouble. An idle mind is the devil's playground.
Lisa Marie Presley

It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.
Bryant H. McGill

It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.
Pythagoras

It is idle to await unanimity.
Robert Dale Owen

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.
Frank B. Kellogg

It is idle to waste time and discuss whether it was within our power and duty to see whether we could prepare a Bill better than the Remedial Bill.
Charles Tupper

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.
Benjamin Franklin

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
Samuel Johnson

Love makes a subtle man out of a crude one, it gives eloquence to the mute, it gives courage the cowardly and makes the idle quick and sharp.
Juan Ruiz

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.
Thomas a Kempis

Nostalgia often leads to idle speculation.
Paul Getty

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
Victor Hugo

Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.
Barbara Johnson

Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.
Mohandas Gandhi

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.
Charles Dudley Warner