In a world that values the hustle bustle, high ambitions, getting your hands dirty and participating in the rat race, we often push aside the value of stillness and write it off as laziness. If you aren’t doing something actively “productive“ at all times – you are doing wrong!
Being busy is too glorified in our culture. Great people from around the world and from different eras have offered some dissimilar insights into stillness – being lazy.
I have gathered some of my favorite humorous and profound quotes to help create a new definition to the cultural perception of being lazy. Enjoy!
“Be still. Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity”
-Lao Tzu
“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
-Oscar Wilde
“Netflix is so much better than going out and pretending to like people.”
-Hussein Nishah
“I’ve heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance?”
– Ronald Reagan
“Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.”
-Jules Renard
“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness – to save oneself trouble.”
-Agatha Christie
“All of the biggest technological inventions created by man – the airplane, the automobile, the computer – says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.”
-Mark Kennedy
“I never work just to work. It’s some combination of laziness and self-respect.”
-Harold Ramis
“A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth.”
-Criss Jami
“As spiritual searchers we need to become freer and freer of the attachment to our own smallness in which we get occupied with me-me-me. Pondering on large ideas or standing in front of things which remind us of a vast scale can free us from acquisitiveness and competitiveness and from our likes and dislikes. If we sit with an increasing stillness of the body and attune our mind to the sky or to the ocean or to the myriad stars at night, or any other indicators of vastness, the mind gradually stills and the heart is filled with quiet joy. Also recalling our own experiences in which we acted generously or with compassion for the simple delight of it without expectation of any gain can give us more confidence in the existence of a deeper goodness from which we may deviate.”
-Ravi Ravindra