On a mission your worst enemy is idle time.
Plough not the seas, sow not the sands,Leave off your idle pain;Seek other mistress for your minds,Love's service is in vain.
Poor dusky children of slavery, men and women of my own race-the transition from slavery to freedom was too sudden for you! The bright dreams were too rudely dispelled; you were not prepared for the new life that opened before you, and the great masses of the North learned to look upon your helplessness with indifference-learned to speak of you as an idle, dependent race. Reason should have prompted kinder thoughts. Charity is ever kind.
Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.
Imagination without initiative would more properly be called idle daydreaming.
A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
An idle reason lessens the weight of the good ones you gave before.
Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth," - our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, - not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation?
A wise prince then. . . should never be idle in times of peace but should industriously lay up stores of which to avail himself in times of adversity so that when fortune abandons him he may be prepared to resist her blows.
Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.
I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.
Nostalgia often leads to idle speculation.
Idle men tempt the devil to tempt them.
Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.
Those who are too idle to read, save for the purpose of amusement, may in these works acquire some acquaintance with history, which, however inaccurate, is better than none.
It was only in South Africa that I got over this shyness, though I never completely overcame it. It was impossible for me to speak impromptu. I hesitated whenever I had to face strange audiences and avoided making a speech whenever I could. Even today I do not think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends engaged in idle talk.
Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics. . . would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.
Nothing can be more idle than the opposition of theory to practice!
It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.