Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Inaction saps the vigor of the mind.

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

It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

I hadn't done anything in six years; I was just vegetating.

Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron.

The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.

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.

Mental inertia is death.

I find it dull when my heart meets my mind

It is a mistake to imagine, that the violent passions only, such as ambition and love, can triumph over the rest. Idleness, languid as it is, often masters them all; she influences all our designs and actions, and insensibly consumes and destroys both passions and virtues.

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

Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth as indolence.

Cynicism means the conduit to the soul has a great kink in it, like a garden hose in which nothing flows in either direction.

I went through a lazy period.

When you do anything for eight or nine years, you start getting a little comfortable; you start taking things for granted.

When I don't feel like working, I don't.

I'm just generally lazy.

Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness.

I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.

The rolling stone never gathereth mosse.

Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Sometimes, the hardest habit to break is the habit of doing nothing beyond the necessary.

Sometimes, when you're really depressed, all you want to do is nothing. All you want to do is lean your head on your arm, and stare into space. Sometimes this can go on for hours. If you're unusually depressed, you may have to change arms.

To be bored to death is a form of suicide.

Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart.