#indolence

The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action. ↗

— John Mason Brown

#critic #indolence #man #opinion #prefers

The town of L— represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquility that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose. ↗

— Thomas de Quincey

#reconciliation-of-opposites #equality

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#enjoy-life #indolence #live-in-the-moment #life

Our abode in this world is transitory, our life therein is but a loan... Our breaths are numbered and our indolence is manifest. ↗

— Abu Bakr

#breaths #indolence #life #loan #manifest

That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves ↗

— C.G. Jung

#indolence #object-of-desire #love

Contentment is, after all, simply refined indolence. ↗

— Thomas Chandler Haliburton

#contentment #indolence #refined #simply

I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive. ↗

— Lord Chesterfield

#brute #destroyed #effectually #i #indolence

Indolence is the sleep of the mind. ↗

— Luc de Clapiers

#mind #sleep

You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#indolence #procrastination #dreams

The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts, but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject. I love to amuse myself with trifles, by beginning a hundred things and never finishing one of them, by going or coming as I take either into my head, by changing my project at every instant, by following a fly through all its windings, in wishing to overturn a rock to see what is under it, by undertaking with ardor the work of ten years, and abandoning it without regret at the end of ten minutes; finally, in musing from morning until night without order or coherence, and in following in everything the caprice of a moment. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#change