Doing Nothing Quotes (page 16)

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• life
• change
• entire

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing. Ian Mcewan

• good
• gentleman
• hand

I cannot suppose there is anybody here who would think it either a good life, or an amusing one, to sit with one's hands before one doing nothing - to live like a gentleman, as fools call it. William Morris

• drinking
• stupid
• evening

Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot. Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong..." you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot. No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours. Chuck Palahniuk

• rock
• life
• week

So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight. Victor Hugo

• best
• sometimes
• doing

Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction. Bob Woodward

• saying
• waiting
• may

Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb--that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully... which only reinforces that particular Lie. Philip K. Dick

• moments
• choices
• candle

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed. At that moment all Will's choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all. Philip Pullman

• nothing
• oneness
• excessiveness

Il ne faut jamais rien outrer: One must do nothing in excess Leo Tolstoy

• control
• many
• between

There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all. Orson Scott Card

• rock
• thinking
• people

No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn't want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like... Ray Bradbury

• soul
• good
• money

I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man... Socrates

• good
• men
• evil

All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good men to do nothing... Edmund Burke

• courage
• responsibility
• rightful

The right response to the non-problem of global warming is to have the courage to do nothing. Christopher Monckton

• opportunity
• doing
• doings

You freeze with the number of opportunities given to you and just decide to do nothing at all. Sam Mendes

• best
• intelligent
• excuses

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation. Aldous Huxley