A Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.

Ambrose Bierce

Quote Topics

Convent Idleness Leisure Meditate Place Retirement Sin Wish Women

Quote Author

Ambrose Bierce
American - Journalist
June 24, 1842 - 1914

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.

Henry David Thoreau

Now the code of life of the High Middle Ages said something entirely opposite to this: that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work's sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanatacism should take its rise from the absence of a will to accomplish something.

Josef Pieper

Idleness is righteous if it is comfortable. Uncomfortable idleness is sin & sinful waste.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

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

Remember, what does 'retirement' mean? It doesn't mean that you're a couch potato. Leisure is not the same thing as rest. If you're bicycling five miles a day, that's leisure, but it certainly takes a lot of effort.

Robert Fogel

In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.

Agnes Repplier

All sin is selfish, whether it be lying, cheating, stealing, immorality, covetousness, or idleness. Sin is for one's own ends, not for another's-certainly not for the Lord's ends.

Derek A. Cuthbert

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.

Henry Ford

It was a place of sin, loose women, whiskey and gambling. It was no place for a good Presbyterian, and I did not long remain one.

Mark Twain

Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor. The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.