Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.
With women, the great business of life is love; and they generally make a mistake in it. They consult neither the heart nor the head, but are led away by mere humour and fancy. If instead of a companion for life, they had to choose a partner in a country-dance or to trifle away an hour with, their mode of calculation would be right. They tie their true-lover's knot with idle, thoughtless haste, while the institutions of society render it indissoluble.
Hope is not an idle term. Hope is the reality that can and does reveal itself to us at God's choice hour. To hope is to know the secret of achievement.
To be rich, to be famous? do these profit a year hence, when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under ground, along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? But only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessings or pervades you, and intercedes for you. Non omnis moriar, if, dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am lost and hopeless, living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
The world of books: romantic, idle, shiftless world so beautiful, so cheap compared with living.
On a mission your worst enemy is idle time.
A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, So I make an idle boast; Jesus of the twice-turned cheek Lamb of God, although I speak With my mouth thus, in my heart Do I play a double part.
I am not ignorant of what is said of my Lord in the Psalm: "You destroy those who speak a lie. " And again: "A lying mouth deals death to the soul. " And likewise the Lord says in the Gospel: "On the day of judgment men shall render account for every idle word they utter. "
Money is nothing more than a tool. It can be a force for good, a force for evil, or simply idle.
It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.
No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.
There are endless ways to amuse oneself and be idle, and most of them lie outside the woods. I assume that when a man goes to the woods he goes because he needs to. I think he is drawn to the wilderness much as he is drawn to a woman: it is, in its way, his opposite. It is as far as possible unlike his home or his work or anything he will ever manufacture. For that reason he can take from it a solace-an understanding of himself, of what he needs and what he can do without-such as he can find nowhere else.
In idle wishes, fools supinely stay. Be there a will and wisdom finds a way.
It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.
Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
Some temptations come to the industrious, but all temptations attack the idle
The idle mind knows not what it wants.
His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72).