Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended.... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored....

Idleness is the mother of all vices, but also of all virtues.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

According to the biblical tradition the absence of work — idleness — was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men — the military class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of military service, and it always will.

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil.

[ An idle youth, a needy age. ]

Idleness.-This evil is usually combined with the preceding. To maintain purity, the mind must be occupied. If left without occupation, the vacuity is quickly filled with unchaste thoughts. Nothing can be worse for a child than to be reared in idleness. His morals will be certain to suffer. Incessant mental occupation’ is the only safeguard against unchastity. Those worthless fops who spend their lives in “killing time” by lounging into bar-rooms, loafing on street corners, or strutting up an down the boulevard, are anything but chaste. Those equally worthless young women who waste their lives on sofas or in easychairs, occupied only with some silly novel or idling away life’s precious hours in reverie-such creatures are seldom the models of purity one would wish to think them If born with a natural propensity toward sin, such a life would soon engender a diseased, impure imagination, I nothing worse.

Idleness is an appendix to nobility.

Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure—particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology—is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn’t shave; it’s not a member of the team; it doesn’t play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracized.

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

398. — Of all our faults that which we most readily admit is idleness: we believe that it makes all virtues ineffectual, and that without utterly destroying, it at least suspends their operation.

Idleness is the open field of perdition, well tilled and sown with evil thoughts.

Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.