There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
Interpretation
Idle time leads to a meaningless existence, akin to waiting for death without purpose.
H. L. Mencken emphasizes the dangers of idleness, suggesting that having unoccupied hours can lead to a sense of purposelessness similar to that experienced by animals awaiting death. He warns that this state is akin to the curse that comes with old age, as individuals devoid of engagement in meaningful activities risk losing their vitality and sense of life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of staying active, one might use this quote to illustrate the dangers of boredom.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
Scapegoating is as American as apple pie. And because there's almost always a racial or ethnic dynamic to it in our country, scapegoating is the evil cousin of white supremacy.
Much of the conventional analysis of India's stature in the world relies on the all-too-familiar economic assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and one of those paradoxes is that so many speak about India as a great power of the 21st century when we are not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our people.
Equality lies only in human moral dignity. ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers.
Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.
Samsara is the mind turned outwardly, lost in its projections. Nirvana is the mind turned inwardly, recognizing its true nature.
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