The invention of money opened a new field to human avarice by giving rise to usury and the practice of lending money at interest while the owner passes a life of idleness.
I've always worked - I can't stay at home and do Cokes and teas, although I think that for those people who want to do that, then that's surely important to them.
Long before I became 'rich and famous' I just sat round drinking wine and staring at the walls.
I think people need more to do in their life if my hair pisses them off.
Hey, if I don't have a job, I don't know why I bother to get up. Any time the phone rings, I'm ready to go. What else am I going to do? See, I've never retired. I don't even know what it means.
And he who lives a hundred years, idle and weak, a life of one day is better if a man has attained firm strength.
I don't want to retire. I'm not that good at crossword puzzles
Leisure without study is death, and the grave of a living man.
I'm a total beach bum.
There is really nothing left to a genuine idle man, who possesses any considerable degree of vital power, but sin.
One meal a day is enough for a lion and would be for all of us if all we did all day was swat flies.
This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.
The epitaphs on tombstones of a great many people should read: Died at thirty, and buried at sixty.
Watering places - the sports of the field - cards! never-failing cards! - the assembly - the theater - all contribute their aid - amusements are multiplied, and combined, and varied, 'to fill up the void of a listless and languid life;' and by the judicious use of these different resources, there is often a kind of sober settled plan of domestic dissipation, in which with all imaginable decency year after year wears away in unprofitable vacancy.
But I think a life of raising prize cattle, going shooting two or three times a year, fishing in the summer, and interspersing the whole thing with some golf and bridge - and whenever I felt like talking or writing, doing it with abandon and with no sense of responsibility whatsoever - maybe such a life wouldn't be so bad.
Well, there doesn't seem anything else for an ex-President to do but go into the country and raise big pumpkins.
Towards the end of his presidency, he was asked his plans for the future:
Right now I'm trying to figure out what I'm gonna do, 'cause I don't want to sit around on my backside all day. If I'm gonna do that I'll be a newspaper reporter.
I don't know exactly what are you supposed to do when you retire. Lie on the couch and do nothing? I didn't want to do that.
So little time and so little to do.
It's pleasant and bothersome and embarrassing all at once. Especially when you haven't done much and are a celebrity.
Life is too short to sit around doing nothing.
An idle life always produces varied inclinations.
I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.
As soon as I discovered weightlifting, all I wanted to do - my plan in life - was to work out, lay on the beach, and get high... smoke dope. And that's really what I'm doing.
Why not sit around a Beverly Hills pool collecting residual cheques? That is not the kind of life I want.