“"Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular — I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.”
"The Jelly-Bean"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
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F. Scott Fitzgerald 411
American novelist and screenwriter 1896–1940Related quotes
“Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.”
Source: The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
“620. An idle Person is the Devil's Playfellow.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Variant: 3054. Idle Fellows are the Devil's Playfellows.
Source: Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
“There is this first benefit from myths, that we have to search and do not have our minds idle.”
III. Concerning myths; that they are divine, and why.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: There is this first benefit from myths, that we have to search and do not have our minds idle.
That the myths are divine can be seen from those who have used them. Myths have been used by inspired poets, by the best of philosophers, by those who established the mysteries, and by the Gods themselves in oracles. But why the myths are divine it is the duty of philosophy to inquire. Since all existing things rejoice in that which is like them and reject that which is unlike, the stories about the Gods ought to be like the Gods, so that they may both be worthy of the divine essence and make the Gods well disposed to those who speak of them: which could only be done by means of myths.
“A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”
An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Il ne manque cependant à l'oisiveté du sage qu'un meilleur nom, et que méditer, parler, lire, et être tranquille s'appelât travailler.
Aphorism 12
Les Caractères (1688), Du mérite personnel
Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 155
“Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.”
XX. On Transmigration of Souls, and how Souls are said to migrate into brute beasts.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: It is the natural duty of souls to do their work in the body; are we to suppose that when once they leave the body they spend all eternity in idleness? Again, if the souls did not again enter into bodies, they must either be infinite in number or God must constantly be making new ones. But there is nothing infinite in the world; for in a finite whole there cannot be an infinite part. Neither can others be made; for everything in which something new goes on being created, must be imperfect. And the world, being made by a perfect author, ought naturally to be perfect.