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“Everyman ought to have patience and pity for poverty, but for laziness a long whip.”
“A man who wastes his time in sloth offers himself to be a target for the devil, who is an awefully good rifleman. In other words, idle men tempt the devil to tempt them.”
“A sluggard is fine raw material for the devil, he can make anything he likes out of him, from a thief up to a murderer.”
“If the devil catch a man idle he will send him to work [for him], and find him tools.”
“Idle folks often never know what leisure means, they are always in a hurry and a mess, by neglecting to work at the proper time they always have a lot to do.”
“Trying to insruct an idle man is like trying to hold water in a siv or fatten a greyhound”
John Ploughman : “For once I was going to give our minister [Spurgeon] a pretty long list of the sins of one of our people he was asking after, I began with, “He’s dreadfully lazy”, “That’s enough!” said the old gentleman, “all sorts of sins are in that one, that’s enough to know a full pledged sinner.”
“Our Lord Jesus told us, the enemy sowed while men slept. It is by the door of sluggishness that evil enters the heart more often it seems to me than any other.”
“My advise to my boys has been to get out of the sluggards way, or you may catch his disease and never get rid of it. I am always afraid of their learning the ways of the idle and I am very watchful to nip anything of the sort in the bud, for you know it is best to kill a lion when it’s a cub”
“Some professors [of Christianity] are amazingly lazy and make sad work for the tongues of the wicked. I think a godly plowmen ought to be the best man in the field and let no team beat him. When we are at work, we ought to be at it, and not stop the plow to talk, even though the talk may be about religion. For then we not only rob our employers of our own time, but of the time of the horses, too. I used to hear people say, “Never stop the plow to catch a mouse,” and it’s quite as silly to stop for idle chat; besides, the man who loiters when the master is away is an eye-server, which, I take it, is the very opposite of a Christian.”
“Religion never was designed to make us idle. Jesus was a great worker, and his disciples must not be afraid of hard work”
-Charles Spurgeon