102 Quotes About Doing-nothing

Releasing resistance to allow miracles to manifest is not about sitting back and doing nothing. It is about stepping back, and doing something.⁠

II sat in my backyard all afternoon and did nothing. Whenever I do nothing I feel I've accomplished a lot.

I sat in my backyard all afternoon and did nothing. Whenever I do nothing I feel I've accomplished a lot.

There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, filled with a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when to sit doing nothing gives us a sense of life's richness and a feeling that the least effort would be intolerable. The melancholy we took with us to table has disappeared and, if we think of it at all it is only to smile, as at some black mood now past, its cause having gone. And with the melancholy, all scruple, all remorse departs from us.

...this evening it's too late, too late to get things right, I'll go to sleep, so that I may say, hear myself say, a little later, I've slept, he's slept, but he won't have slept, or else he's sleeping now, he'll have done nothing, nothing but go on, doing what, doing what he does, that is to say, I don't know, giving up, that's it, I'll have gone on giving up, having had nothing, not being there.

I’ve been nothing but kind to you. I’m not some sort of monster.” “No, you’re the man who sits idly by, congratulating yourself on your decency, while the monster eats his fill. At least a monster has teeth and a spine.

The only alternative seems to be doing nothing…and doing nothing, I find, rarely accomplishes anything

pretending to do something when you're doing nothing is an art form in itself.

Free time allows building of reputations — either as someone who is excellent at killing time by doing nothing or someone who can utilize the time by creating things out of nothing. People becoming habitual to doing nothing, get nothing at the end.