Stephen Covey Quotes

I'm a big fan of not working.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

I like doing nothing, actually. Doing nothing is better thing when I am not working.

Idleness is an inlet to disorder, and makes way for licentiousness. People who have nothing to do are quickly tired of their own company.

I want to be lazier. This is the luxurious dream I have: Doing nothing all day, just watching the clouds and DVDs.

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter.

Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, “What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life.

I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.

I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

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.

Idleness and lack of occupation tend - nay are dragged - towards evil.

There is not a thing on the face of the earth that I abhor so much as idleness or idle people.

Doing nothing makes us crazy. But freedom comes when you don't have to work.

Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.

As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.

Sunday is a day of rest. Loafing is not rest.

When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.

The human heart is like a millstone in a mill: when you put wheat under it, it turns and grinds and bruises the wheat to flour; if you put no wheat, it still grinds on, but then 'tis itself it grinds and wears away.

When a soldier complains of his hard life (or a labourer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.

Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.