Doing Nothing Quotes
Most popular doing nothing quotes
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.
If you can find a moment to sit, wherever you are, stay there and enjoy doing nothing. Just enjoy your in-breath and out-breath. Don't allow yourself to be carried away by your thinking, worries, or projects. Just sit there and enjoy doing nothing; enjoy your breathing and the fact that you are alive and that you have twenty minutes or half an hour to enjoy doing nothing. This is very healing, transforming, and nourishing.
In our society, we're inclined to see doing nothing as something negative, even evil. But when we lose ourselves in activities, we diminish our quality of being. We do ourselves a disservice. It's important to preserve ourselves, to maintain our freshness and good humor, our joy and compassion. In Buddhism we cultivate aimlessness, and in fact in Buddhist tradition the ideal person, an arhat or a bodhisattva, is a businessless person—someone with nowhere to go and nothing to do. People should learn how to just be there, doing nothing.
If we could just learn to sit still for ten minutes and do without distractions, there would be no more wars.
For your holidays, don't go to resorts where you meet "achievers" on commoditized vacation actively trying to relax. Go to villages with no activity (preferably your village of origin and if you don't have one, get adopted somewhere) and interact with locals who can teach you how to do nothing when there is nothing to do.
