"Hereditary sloth instructs me."
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Sloth quotes
Sloth
133 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Sloth quotes (page 3 of 7)
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"Sloth is sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good...it is evil in its effect, if it so oppresses man as to draw him away entirely from good deeds."
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"To spend too much time in studies is sloth."
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"You need not be proud of me.... I'm only being active till you can be again--it isn't such a great desire on my part to serve theworld and I'll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily!"
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"I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth."
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"Sloth is the tempter that beguiles and expels from paradise."
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"The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity."
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"There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business."
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"Knowledge is praised and desired by multitudes whom her charms could never rouse from the couch of sloth; whom the faintest invitation of pleasure draws away from their studies; to whom any other method of wearing the day is more eligible than the use of books, and who are more easily engaged by any conversation than such as may rectify their notions or enlarge their comprehension."
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"To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affection; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar."
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"To misuse one's talent, to be cavalier about it, to set it aside because of fear or sloth is unpardonable."
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"In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind."
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"The monster is never just there where we think he is. What is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth."
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"In late modernity we grow more and more accustomed to politicians and public figures who are indebted to their appetites for their "values," to their intellectual sloth for their "principles," to their rhetorical cleverness for their "conscience," and to their regimented conformism for their "philosophy.""
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"Cynicism is only intellectual sloth."
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