Idleness is the mother of progress. So long as men were busy they had no time to think of bettering their condition.  
Idleness is the mother of art. It was when men had leisure from the chase that they decorated the handles of their hunting-knives and the walls of their cave-dwellings.
 
Idleness is the mother of religion. It is in the relax and rebound from toil that men think of God.
 
We talk of all men’s right to work. There is a deeper right than that. It is the right to idleness.
 
The value of what we put upon the page 52 of life depends upon the width of the margin.
 
The great, useful, redeeming, and lasting work of the world is that work which is a reaction from idleness. The continent of labor is barren. It is the little island of labor that is green and fruitful in the sea of leisure.
 
The curse of America is its deification of labor. Our little gods are the men who are ceaselessly forthputting.
 
Most of all we deify capital, which never rests, but goes on producing day and night.
 
We are so occupied in getting ready to live that we have lost the art of living.
 
With us a man is a fool if he sets about to enjoy himself before he has laid up a fortune. We count the woman happy when she has married money, and the child accursed when he has no inheritance.
 
53
Every morning we arise from our beds and charge bloodthirstily into the struggle. We all do it, millionaires and paupers. In his office the trust magnate sits at his scheming until his nerves are loosed, his arteries hardened, and his soul caked. The slaves of Rome never worked so hard as many of our laborers in mines and factories.
 
“After the Semitic fashion,” says Remy de Goncourt, “you make even the wo............