A Quote by Jerome K. Jerome

There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one.

Jerome K. Jerome

Quote Topics

Doing Doing Nothing Exhausting Fun Merely Most No Fun Nothing Occupation Then Time Wasting Wasting Time

Quote Author

Jerome K. Jerome
English - Author
May 2, 1859 - June 14, 1927

All mental hygiene is based on the core practice of doing nothing. Most of us are good at wasting time, staring at the wall while telling ourselves we should be working. We call this doing nothing, but our brains are furiously active. We think constantly, and our thinking is often rife with distress.

Martha Beck

No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine.

Paulo Coelho

When I see people wasting their hours doing nothing productive, nothing to contribute to the world, nothing to build relationships, it makes me sad. Actually, it makes me mad. I want to scream, 'Wake up!'.

Delilah

I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.

Philip Larkin

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

Joshua Ferris

If God created the universe, there was a time when he commenced to create. Back of that commencement there must have been an eternity. In that eternity what was this God doing? He certainly did not think. There was nothing to think about. He did not remember. Nothing had ever happened. What did he do? Can you imagine anything more absurd than an infinite intelligence in infinite nothing wasting an eternity?

Robert Green Ingersoll

I was a man who played basketball and after I played basketball and before I played basketball I was going to be a psychologist, whereas most people who play their occupation is their definition - and then when they stop doing who they are, they become nothing.

John Amaechi

We all sorely complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.

Seneca the Younger

What do you mean less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.

E. B. White

Wasting one's youth is better than doing nothing at all with it.

Georges Courteline

The ultimate fun is doing nothing. I like doing nothing with people I like - maybe just eating, hanging out and talking.

Heather Graham

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be, as Poor Richard says, “the greatest prodigality'; since, as he elsewhere tells us, 'Lost time is never found again'; and 'What we call time enough always proves little enough'. Let us then up and be doing, and doing to the purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity.

Benjamin Franklin

You can always look back and see where you might have done something differently, changed this or that. If you can learn something, fine, but never second-guess yourself. It's wasted effort.... Does worrying about it, complaining about it, change it? Nope, it just wastes your time. And if you complain about it to other people, you're also wasting their time. Nothing is gained by wasting all of that time.

John Wooden

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production - oriented society and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

Rebecca Solnit

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

Rebecca Solnit

Your reality is yours. Stop wasting time looking at someone else's reality while doing nothing about yours.