Robertson Davies Quotes

Indolence is the sleep of the mind.

Nothing is more tragic - or more common - than mental inertia.

A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind.

Idleness is the stupidity of the body, and stupidity is the idleness of the mind.

Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. "He who desires but acts not," wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, "Breeds pestilence.

Inaction saps the vigor of the mind.

Sloth is sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good...it is evil in its effect, if it so oppresses man as to draw him away entirely from good deeds.

There are lazy minds as well as lazy bodies.

In indolent vacuity of thought.

Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.

The more often a man feels without acting, the less he is able to act and in the long run the less he is able to feel.

A body that doesn't move mentally or physically dies.

Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, - forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.

Boredom is nothing but the experience of a paralysis of our productive powers.

The idle mind knows not what it wants.

Indolence is the dry rot of even a good mind and a good character; the practical uselessness of both. It is the waste of what might be a happy and useful life.

The indolent mind is not empty, but full of vermin.

You get lazy, you get sad. Start givin' up. Plain and simple.

A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.

Sloth is the torpidity of the mental faculties; the sluggard is a living insensible.

Before she got here everything had stalled inside me, and every morning I was just moving toward nighttime.

What is undeniable is that when comforts and convenience sap our energies and idealism, inactivity secretes sloth in to our minds like a poison in the blood.

Ennui is the desire of activity without the fit means of gratifying the desire.

I no longer have it (desire to play).

Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.