Vices

"Although we live by strife, We're always sorry to begin it, For what, we ask, is life Without a touch of Poetry in it?"

"The only cure for indolence is work; the only cure for selfishness is sacrifice; the only cure for unbelief is to shake off the ague of doubt, by doing Christ's bidding; the only cure for timidity is to plunge into some dreaded duty before the chill comes on."

"When you and I are inclined to nestle down in indolence and self-indulgence, God " stirs up our nests;" and bids us fly upward."

"The worst idleness is that of the heart. Think of the condition and prospects of a voiceless, thankless, prayerless heart."

"I am not the only one that condemns the idle; for once when I was going to give our minister a pretty long list of the sins of one of our people that he was asking after, I began with, "He's dreadfully lazy." "That's enough," said the old gentleman; " all sorts of sins are in that one.""

"A good many people are complaining all the time about themselves, and crying out, "My leanness! my leanness!" when they ought rather to say, " My laziness! my laziness!""

"Be always employed about some rational thing that the devil find thee not idle."

"An idle man has a constant tendency to torpidity. He has adopted the Indian maxim — that it is better to walk than to run, and better to stand than to walk, and better to sit than to stand, and better to lie than to sit. He hugs himself into the notion, that God calls him to be quiet."

"Idleness is the great corrupter of youth, and the bane and dishonor of middle age. He who, in the prime of life, finds time to hang heavy on his hands, may with much reason suspect that he has not consulted the duties which the consideration of his age imposed upon him; assuredly he has not consulted his happiness."

"If you are idle, you are on the road to ruin; and there are few stopping places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road."

"The idle man is the devil's cushion."

"The passive idler of all men in the world is the most difficult to please. Those who do the least themselves are always the severest critics upon the noble achievements of others."

"At ease in a world in which my Lord was such a sufferer!"

"Indolence is the worst enemy that the church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar, stretching themselves on beds of ease, or sit idly with folded hands looking lazily out on fields white for the harvest, but where no sickle rings against the wheat."

"There is no such thing as a lazy person; he is either sick or uninspired."

"The lazy are always wanting to do something."

"The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts."

"People standing on escalators! And that is a testimony to human laziness! I mean, the guy who invented the escalator is just, probably, kicking himself in the ass. Do you think the guy made the escalator so people—and they're made like stairs—just so people stand on it so you go up and down? You're supposed to walk on 'em so you get there faster. You know? And then people stand on there. So every time Im on an escalator, I'm just like, "Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me…." You know? That's my pet peeve, right there. And I'm gonna do something about it, and I'm urging you to do something about it! Write your congressman, get a group together, get together, and—I think we can do something about this."

"An ingenious theory has arisen regarding the catapultic bat of Babe Ruth, which may explain how it is possible this early in the season for a batter to pile up twenty-three home runs. It seems Babe is a human being built on colossal proportions and that he is not overly fond of running bases at the fast and furious gait of his contemporary, Ty Cobb. To save his lumbering body the effort, therefore, he hits the ball over the fence and makes the circuit of the four bases at his leisure. That is as satisfactory an explanation as any other. The ways of laziness are indeed clever. Some there are who contend that most of the labor-saving devices that have revolutionized modern industries have sprung from the fertile brains, set in inactive bodies, of lazy men. Constructive laziness is, according to that school of thinking, a boon to humanity and a blazer of progress. Ruth, finding base-running inconvenient, devises a means of overcoming it and is hailed as the home run king of the world, admired of thousands and becomes the recipient of fat pay checks at whose figures the merely industrious man gasps."

"[M]an when not stimulated by hope or necessity is naturally a lazy animal."

"Don't yield to that alluring witch, laziness, or else be prepared to surrender all that you have won in your better moments."

"Sleepiness and laziness in a man are the beginning of his misfortune."

"Idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them – their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table."

"An idler is a watch that wants both hands; As useless when it goes as when it stands."

"Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed."

"My ambition is handicapped by my laziness"

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."

"Bhikkhus, the lazy person dwells in suffering, soiled by evil unwholesome states, and great is the personal good that he neglects. But the energetic person dwells happily, secluded from evil unwholesome states, and great is the personal good that he achieves. It is not by the inferior that the supreme is attained; rather, it is by the supreme that the supreme is attained. Bhikkhus, this holy life is a beverage of cream; the Teacher is present. Therefore, bhikkhus, arouse your energy for the attainment of the as-yet-unattained, for the achievement of the as-yet-unachieved, for the realization of the as-yet-unrealized."

"LAZINESS, n. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree."

"As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth."

"Most people are indifferent, unless their self-interest is at stake. Then there are the chronic complainers."

"The more the Jew is a Jew, the more universalist will his views and aspirations be, the less aloof will he be from anything that is noble and good, true and upright, in art or science, in culture or education; the more joyfully will he applaud whenever he sees truth and justice and peace and the ennoblement of man prevail and become dominant in human society."

"The greatest danger to our future is apathy."

"Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees."

"If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes."

"Apathy is the glove in which evil slips its hand."

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death."

"In any election, only a percentage of the people vote. Those who can't vote because of age or other disqualifications, and those who don't vote because of confusion, apathy, or disgust at a Tweedledum-Tweedledummer choice can hardly be said to have any voice in the passage of the laws which govern them. Nor can the individuals as yet unborn, who will be ruled by those laws in the future."

"He who has never hoped can never despair."

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."

"Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it's going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is."

"There are few signs in a soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true — the real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false."

"Yes, we all know that curiosity killed the cat, but indifference kills people, both physically and metaphorically, every single day, when it surrenders to despots, aggressors, and villains."

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."

"Indifference, if let alone, will produce obduracy; and obduracy, if let alone, will produce torment."

"Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all."

"We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind."

"The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things."

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."