Indolence is avoidance of activity or exertion; laziness.

1. It’s usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
W.H. Auden

2. I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate indolence, oppression, injustice; hate Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them with a deep, living, godlike hatred.
Frederick William Robertson

3. There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.
Franz Kafka

4. It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
Tom Stoppard

5. We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
Toni Morrison

6. Wealth Is The Parents Of Luxury And Indolence And Poverty Of Meanness And Viciousness And Both Of Discontent. Parents
Anonymous

7. Indolence is stagnation; employment is life.
Seneca the Younger

8. Jane Austen: “It is indolence… Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.
Jean Austen

9. Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence… I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
Jean Cocteau

10. I’m constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.
Jeffrey Eugenides

11. This pursuit requires sustained, vigorous effort. It allows for no indolence, no lethargy, no halfhearted commitment, and no laissez- faire attitude toward even the smallest sins. In short, it demands the highest priority in a Christian’s life because to be holy is to be like Christ – God’s goal for every Christian. The word pursue
Jerry Bridges

12. There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs
Henry Ward Beecher

13. Discourtesy does not spring merely from one bad quality, but from several — from foolish vanity, from ignorance of what is due to others, from indolence, from stupidity, from distraction of thought, from contempt of others, from jealousy.
Jean De La Bruyere

14. Indolence is a delightful but distressing state. We must be doing something to be happy.
William Haziett

15. Indolence is heaven ‘s ally here, And energy the child of hell : The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.
Herman Melville

16. And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, ’tis certain it must lie very deep and abstruse; and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious.
David Hume

17. There is no moment like the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards: they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence.
Maria Edgeworth

18. Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries
Tom Hodgkinson

19. Love and respect a woman. Look to her not only for comfort, but for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you have none
Giuseppe Mazzini

20. Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle; for the calamities of life, like the necessities of nature, are calls to labour and diligence. When we feel any pressure of distress, we are not to conclude that we can only obey the will of Heaven by languishing under it, any more than when we perceive the pain of thirst, we are to imagine that water is prohibited
Samuel Johnson

21. Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy.
Alexander Maclaren

22. Art Disturbs the Indolence of the Mind
Anonymous

23. Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients; action, pleasure and indolence. And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure the relish of the whole composition. composition.
David Hume

24. I suppose that there is no point wasting time being lazy, though of course indolence in a divine way, actually has its advantages.
Stephen Fry

25. Comfort and indolence are cronies.
Thomas Hood

26. She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness…A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there
Anaïs Nin

27. The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed
Soren Kierkegaard

28. 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.
Frederic Dan Huntington

29. I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive.
Lord Chesterfield

30. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.
Benjamin Haydon

31. Injustice arises either from precipitation or indolence or from a mixture of both. The rapid and the slow are seldom just; the unjust wait either not at all, or wait too long.
Johann Kaspar Lavater

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32. Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than the assumption of the discordance between the former and the existing causes of change
Charles Lyell

33. Other men have acquired fame by industry, but this man by indolence.
Tacitus

34. 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.
Frederic Dan Huntington

35. Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame
Mahatma Gandhi

36. Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
H. G. Wells

37. Sunday is more than a day of rest from the ordinary occupations of the week. It is not to be considered as merely a day of lazy indolence and idleness or for physical pleasures and indulgences. It is a feastday for your spirit bodies.
Harold B Lee

38. Moderation is the languor and indolence of the soul, as ambition is its ardour and activity.
François de La Rochefoucauld

39. You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books
Voltaire

40. To will the impossible is usually a sin of indolence.
Fanny Lewald

41. In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.
James Hutton

42. Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy.
Mahatma Gandhi

43. Contentment is, after all, simply refined indolence.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton

44. Man like every other animal is by nature indolent. If nothing spurs him on, then he will hardly think, and will behave from habit like an automaton.
Albert Einstein

45. Advice is seldom welcome and those who need it the most like it the least.
Lord Chesterfield

46. Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
Plato

47. Indolence is the sleep of the mind.
Luc de Clapiers

48. Indolence, languid as it is, often masters both passions and virtues.
François de La Rochefoucauld

49. I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.
Bernard Williams

50. The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
George Christoph Lichtenberg

51. My passion was dead. For years it had rolled over and submerged me; now I felt empty. But that wasn’t the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn’t look at it
Jean-Paul Sartre

52. The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.
John Mason Brown

53. What is public opinion1 It is private indolence.
Georg Brandes

54. Flee sloth; for the indolence of the soul is the decay of the body.
Cato the Elder

55. There are two sorts of content; one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence. The first is a virtue; the other, a vice.
Maria Edgeworth

56. I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive
Lord Chesterfield

57. What is often called indolence is in fact the unconscious consciousness of incapacity.
Henry Crabb Robinson

58. Seeming contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level.
John Stuart Mill

59. Of all the cankers of human happiness none corrodes it so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth as indolence.
Thomas Jefferson

60. There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
Henry Ward Beecher

61. We grow old more through indolence, than through age.
Christina of Sweden

62. The avoidance of little evils, little sins, little inconsistencies, little weaknesses, little follies, little indiscretions and imprudences, little foibles, little indulgences of self and of the flesh, little acts of indolence or indecision, or slovenliness or cowardice, little equivocations or aberrations from high integrity, little touches of shabbiness or meanness…little indifferences to the feelings or wishes of others, little outbreaks of temper, or crossness, or selfishness, or vanity – the avoidance of such little things as these goes far to make up at least the negative beauty of a holy life
Horatius Bonar