Productive Idleness Quotes

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.

Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work least, for they are thinking out inventions.

But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constantand imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result.

Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.

Laziness is the road to progress, but only when it is allied to intelligent thought and high ambition.

I literally have a song about how bored I was and it's actually a really cool song that's interesting because I created something out of nothing.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.

I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic!

Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.

Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.