Top 1200 Idle Time Quotes & Sayings

The Buddha also counseled the monks and nuns to avoid wasting any precious time by engaging in idle conversation, oversleeping, pursuing fame and recognition, chasing after desires, spending time with people of poor character, and being satisfied with only a shallow understanding of the teaching.

But there's not enough time in life to go sit at a party, have a drink, and make idle conversation. There's too many important things to do. Just being together with my husband, spending time alone, which I have very little of.

Regret for time wasted can become a power for good in the time that remains, if we will only stop the waste and the idle, useless regretting.

And if nobody reads me, shall I have wasted my time, when I have beguiled so many idle hours with such pleasant and profitable reflections?

It is the idle man, not the great worker, who is always complaining that he has no time or opportunity.

They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

History's political and economic power structures have always abhorred 'idle people' as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.

I used to be quite a big video game player at university and post-university in that weird moment in life before you have a proper job and you've got a lot of idle time.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

People who truly have control over time always have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. A sense of priorities drives their use of time and it can shift away from the ordinary work that’s easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify. They protect their time from trivia and idiocy; these people are time rich. They provide themselves with a surplus of time. They might seem to idle, or relax more often than the rest, but that just might be a sign of their mastery, not their incompetence.

As a CEO, you have to take the active action to force most of your resources to stand idle from time to time - or go bankrupt.

The way I think I should stay out of trouble is by stayin' busy. With idle time comes a lot of biz, so the more my work load is heavy, I'll have no time to get into any trouble or makin' dis tracks or get into conversation about any other rappers.

If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must make allowances for the rich men's failings, and recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for work, a mortal's natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a great fortune, do but be splendid and idle?

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

On a mission your worst enemy is idle time.

People used to complain about 'the idle rich.' But the idle rich did not do the kind of harm being done by today's busybody rich, who feed their own egos by bankrolling political crusades on the left which hurt the very people that the left claims to care about -- working people, minorities, and children.

If you create you will also wait, and while you're waiting you will want to be patient but not idle... responses from the world often take a long time.

Only a great man, believe me, and one whose excellence rises far above human failings, will not allow anything to be stolen from his own span of time, and his life is very long precisely because he has devoted to himself entirely any time that became available. None of it lay uncultivated and idle, none was under another man's control, for guarding it most jealously, he found nothing worth exchanging for his own precious time.

Idle time is the devil's play.

Time and again, we have found the 'idle' truths arrived at through the process of inquiry to be of the greatest moment for practical human affairs.

To the extent that sacrifices need to be made, shouldn't the people who've made out like bandits this past generation be first in line? The problem with getting out of the slump is that we need to spend more. It's not that somebody needs to spend less. We have idle workers who have the skills and the willingness to work. We have idle factories. Dealing with this is not about saying somebody needs to suffer. It's saying that we need to be prepared to open the taps.

Never let the brain idle. ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.’ And the devil’s name is Alzheimer’s.

No "natural" resource is more precious and to be used more wisely than time. These mortal moments matter more than we know. There are no idle hours; there are only idle people. In true righteousness there is serenity, but there is an array of reminders that the "sacred present" is packed with possibilities which are slipping by us, which are going away from us each moment.

When the idle poor become the idle rich, you'll never know just who is who, or which is which.

When the idle poor, Become the idle rich, You'll never know, Just who is who, Or who is which.

I'm a call-sheet junkie. I love being on set. So, the hardest thing for me is dealing with all this idle time. That's when I get into trouble.

I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow.

People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.

Old Flossie settle down on the other side of What-the-Dickens and dragged some handiwork out of a sack. She armed herself with two thorns shaped into knitting needles. A wodge of curlicued metallic scrubbing pad supplied the threat. 'I knit handcuffs as a hobby,' explained Old Flossie happily, and set to work. 'Idle hands get up to no good, so I like to be prepared in case I meet up with any idle hands.

To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.

In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.'

Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.

Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it on riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?

although it has been said that idle hands are the devil's workshop, when it comes to teenagers, both idle and active hands are the devil's workshop.

It is idle to waste time and discuss whether it was within our power and duty to see whether we could prepare a Bill better than the Remedial Bill.

The dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time.

I would love to get a place out in the country and spend my idle time just remodeling and planting seeds and watching them grow.

Our unconscious is like a vast subterranean factory with intricate machinery that is never idle, where work goes on day and night from the time we are born until the moment of our death.

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.

One who does not rouse themself when it is time to rise, who, though capable, is full of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle person will never find their way to true knowledge.

I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.

Chemistry seems to be pretty much nailed down, and biology gains ground all the time. But physics seems to be mired in idle rumination. They think a Big Bang started the universe, but they don't really know.

I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.

No idle word should be uttered. I understand a word to be idle when it serves no good purpose, either for myself or for another, and was not intended to do so.

There is no more self-contradictory concept than that of idle thoughts. What gives rise to the perception of a whole world can hardly be called idle. Every thought we have either contributes to truth or to illusion.

Could a mariner sit idle if he heard the drowning cry? Could a doctor sit in comfort and just let his patients die? Could a fireman sit idle, let men burn and give no hand? Can you sit at ease in Zion with the world around you damned?

I really hate relaxing. I've done three movies in a row, worked for two years straight, and to me, idle time is the devil's workshop. I like to focus on something.

I can't stand still; I find it very difficult to sit around and do nothing. I've got to have projects on the go because the devil makes work for idle hands. I've got to be going forward all the time.

Just enough sense to stick with something-a chore, task, project, until its completed pays off much better than idle intelligence, even if idle intelligence be of genius caliber.

There are a lot of young people out there who need to start using their idle time in a positive way. Parents need to play an important role in making sure their children succeed in school.

Most of the time, feelings just seem to get in the way. They're a luxury for the idle, a bourgeois concept. Feelings are overrated.

New York musicians rarely have the time for idle chat and conversation after a gig. Despite popular assumption of our scintillating after-hours, that illusion is overtaken by the constant hustle to juggle a part-time or full-time job, a myriad of errands, a second or third gig of the day, and perhaps a child or two somewhere.

Idlers cannot even find time to be idle, or the industrious to be at leisure. We must always be doing or suffering

I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.

There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.

I don't like idle time.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

It would be idle to say that we were not, from time to time, aware that a volcano slumbered fitfully beneath us. There were dark sides to the Slavery Question, for master, as for slave.

It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.