Indolence
Illustration★★★Remonstrance against, Since thou hast an alarm in thy breast, which tells thee thou hast a living spirit in thee above two thousand times in an hour, dull not away thy days in slothful supinity and the tediousness of doing nothing. To strenuous minds there is an inquietude in overquietness, and no laboriousness in labor; and to tread a mile after the slow pace of a snail, or the heavy measures of the lazy of Brazilia, were a most tiring penance, and worse than a race of some furlongs at the Olympics.
The rapid courses of the heavenly bodies are rather imitable by our thoughts, than our corporeal motions: yet the solemn motions of our lives amount unto a greater measure than is commonly appre hended. Some few men have surrounded the globe of the earth; yet many in their set locomotions and movements of their days have measured the circuit of it, and twenty thousand miles have been exceeded by them. T. Browne.
The point
A philosophical exhortation against idleness, urging that the restless human spirit is unsuited to slothful ease and that even ordinary daily activity, accumulated over a lifetime, amounts to a vast undertaking.