A Quote by Ezra Cornell

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron

Ezra Cornell

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Human Human Mind Idleness Iron Like Mind Rust

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Ezra Cornell
American - Businessman
January 11, 1807 - December 9, 1874

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.

Ezra Cornell

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.

Samuel Smiles

. . . if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust. . . .

Geoffrey Chaucer

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.

Samuel Smiles

Just as rust, which arose from the iron itself, wears out the iron, likewise, performing an action without examination would destroy us by projecting us into a negative state of existence.

Dalai Lama

Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions.

Henry David Thoreau

Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness.

William Ralph Inge

Shun idleness. It is rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.

Voltaire

War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.

Victor Davis Hanson

Prefer diligence before idleness, unless you esteem rust above brightness.

Plato

Slavery...dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.

Robert South

When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-ered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, Then nothing will remain of the iron age And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain.

Robinson Jeffers

As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.

Antisthenes

I have legs of iron, but to tell you the truth, they're starting to rust and buckle a bit.

Jeanne Calment

The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.

Thomas Traherne

A Quote by Ezra Cornell

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