Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

Idleness is an appendix to nobility.

I found out some time back that it’s idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities – contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone, good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures — eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun — than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it

lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired

The paper was Catholic, but she embraced a philosophy of personalism, which is an affirmation of the dignity of each person,

There were moments, usually on a sunny Easter morning, when she wished that she could with sincerity call herself a Christian; but for the rest of the year she knew herself to be what she was - incurably agnostic but prone to unpredictable relapses into faith.

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 breeds our better virtues.

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

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.

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.

Cardinal Aveline: Identity, the core and physiognomy of what constitutes us, what we are, can only be built within a living relationship with otherness, with the other; a closed, impermeable identity is sterile.
Interviewer: Is that why you are so committed to interreligious dialogue?
Cardinal Aveline: No, the opposite happened. On this front, which was assigned to me by surprise by my bishop at the time, Mgr. Robert Coffy, I was able to verify the truth I had experienced in my life: through dialogue, familiarity, openness and sharing, we are able to make our identity flourish and encounter others more closely, and also to be missionaries, which does not mean proselytising. We need to de-centre ourselves in order to live the mission.

Indolence had a great part in his temperament; a book, a sunny corner, and entire tranquillity, formed his ideal of supportable existence.

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?