A Quote by Voltaire

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

Voltaire

Quote Topics

Brilliant Idleness Itself Metals Most Rust Shun

Quote Author

Voltaire
French - Writer
November 21, 1694 - May 30, 1778

The most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy.

Antoine Rivarol

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

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

What are the most brilliant of our chymical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals?

Benjamin Disraeli

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron

Ezra Cornell

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.

Ezra Cornell

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

William Ralph Inge

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

Plato

It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness.

George Borrow

Labor is life! 'Tis the still water faileth; Idleness ever despaireth, bewaileth; Keep the watch wound, for the dark rust assaileth.

Frances Sargent Osgood

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

Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time.

Leonard Cohen

Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.

Charles Caleb Colton

We are overdone with banking institutions, which have banished the precious metals, and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium... These have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness... These are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.