Idle Thoughts Quotes

When ideas float in our mind, without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that which the French call reverie.

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72).

I daydream all the time.

People who sit for hours in a beach chair or an airplane seat without any reading material simply baffle me: What is going on between their ears, I wonder?

I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

Although even when I am being idle I have plenty of food for thought both early and late - thoughts both about and not about art.

The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.

Nature never makes excellent things, for mean or no uses: and it is hardly to be conceived, that our infinitely wise Creator, should make so admirable a Faculty, as the power of Thinking, that Faculty which comes nearest the Excellency of his own incomprehensible Being, to be so idlely and uselesly employ'd, at least 1/4 part of its time here, as to think constantly, without remembering any of those Thoughts, without doing any good to it self or others, or being anyway useful to any other part of Creation.

When I am traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly.

Minds which never rest are subject to many digressions.

Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.

My real thinking and planning gets done when I'm doing something else like driving or walking or taking the shower.

Purge your mind of all aimless and idle thoughts, especially those that pry into the affairs of others or wish them ill.

I always like to keep busy, otherwise my brain starts ticking.

The right use of leisure is no doubt a harder problem than the right use of our working hours. The soul is dyed the color of its leisure thoughts.

I get a lot of ideas sitting in the living room staring at the walls or lying in bed thinking about things.

In idling, the motor's running, but you're letting your mind take in anything. Things pop into it. Those are the gifts of subterranean conscious.

Thinking little at all about nothing in particular.

The soul is dyed with the color of its leisure thoughts.

I mean, you could lie here day after day, if you wanted to, and think about nothing but waterbugs. Not chase waterbugs, mind you, just think about them. You could spend your whole day, every day, just wondering and pondering about waterbugs, and talking to others about waterbugs . . . and before you realized it, you'd be old. One day you'd realize that you'd never actually seen a waterbug . . . but by then you wouldn't want to, because it would spoil all your beautiful ideas.

I do all my thinking lying down.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Just let them sit in the goddam sun. But the world won't let them because there's nothing more dangerous than letting old farts sit in the sun. They might be thinking. Same thing with kids. Keep 'em busy or they might start thinking.

I was so frivolous for so many years. It was so much fun, but you feel guilty about the brain energy you use to think about whether some celebrity was sleeping with another celebrity. The conjecture that goes along with that. You feel like your mind has been shot apart.