Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Chazon Ish, named Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz

At times, laziness is the root of taking action. When we feel an urge to give in to a desire, we might hear a whisper telling us that something is not right. Laziness, however, prevents us from fighting that desire and we give in to our bad habit.

Action | Character | Desire | Fighting | Habit | Laziness | Right |

Francis Osborn

Leave your bed upon the first desertion of sleep it being ill for the eyes to read lying, and worse for the mind to be idle; since the head during that laziness is commonly a cage for unclean thoughts.

Character | Laziness | Lying | Mind | Wisdom |

Frank Plumpton Ramsey

The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and wooliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.

Character | Danger | Laziness | Philosophy | Danger |

Benjamin Franklin

Employ thy time well if thou meanest to gain leisure; and since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour. Leisure is time for doing something useful, and this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never, for a life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things.

Art | Laziness | Leisure | Life | Life | Man | Time | Will | Wisdom | Art |

Benjamin Franklin

Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.

Business | Day | Industry | Laziness | Poverty | Sloth | Wisdom | Business |

Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work.

Idleness | Laziness | Nothing | Property | Society | Will | Wisdom | Work | Society |

Francesco Guicciardini

Ambition is not a reprehdnsible quality, nor are ambitious men to be censured, if they seek glory through honorable and honest means. In fact, it is they who produce great and excellent works. Those who lack this passion are cold spirits, inclined towards laziness than activity. But ambition is pernicious and detestable when it has as its sole end power.

Ambition | Glory | Laziness | Means | Men | Passion | Power | Ambition |

Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Six, or at most seven, hour’s sleep is, for a constancy, as much as you or anybody else can want; more is only laziness and dozing, and is, I am persuaded, both unwholesome and stupefying.

Constancy | Laziness |

Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Aim at perfection in everything, though in most things it is unattainable; however, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer it than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.

Despondency | Laziness | Perfection | Will |

Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

No matter what his present state, man can change for the better through self-control, discipline, and following proper diet and health laws. Why do you think you cannot change? Mental laziness is the secret cause of all weakness.

Better | Cause | Change | Control | Diet | Discipline | Health | Laziness | Man | Present | Self | Self-control | Weakness | Following | Think |

J. C. Penney, formally James Cash Penney

Luck is always the last refuge of laziness and incompetence.

Laziness |

Moshe Chayim Luzzatto, also Moses Hayyim Luzzato, known by Hebrew acronym RaMCHal

The bad that comes from laziness does not come about in one fell swoop, but slowly and without notice. It comes in a sequence of one leisurely bad deed after another, until you find yourself sunk in evil.

Laziness |

Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL

But one cannot achieve anything through laziness and procrastination. People who desire worldly enjoyment say about spiritual progress: 'Well, it will all happen in time. We shall realize God some time or other.'

Desire | Enjoyment | God | Laziness | People | Time | Will | God |

Robertson Davies

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.

Hate | Laziness | Nothing |

Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper

Nationalism appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility.

Knowledge | Laziness | Pride |

Sam Keen

Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.

Laziness |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

Cowardice | Hate | Laziness | Nothing | Pride |