Procrastination

Procrastination refers to the deferment of actions or tasks to a later time.

Quotes

• I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
  • Douglas Adams,The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

• God has promised forgiveness to your repentance; but He has not promised to-morrow to your procrastination.
  • Augustine of Hippo, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 486.

• The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes El Memorioso"] (Funes the Memorious), in Ficciones (1944); also published in Labyrinths (1964)

• Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605-1615), Pt. I, Bk. IV, Ch. 2

• Faith in to-morrow instead of Christ, is Satan's nurse for man's perdition.
  • George B. Cheever, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 486.

• Qui recte vivendi prorogat horam,
  Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis.
  • He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
  • Horace, Epistles. Bk. i, epis. 2. l.

• If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
  • Thomas de Quincey,"Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts", in Blackwood's Magazine, November 1839

• procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday
  • Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel (1927), "certain maxims of archy"

• Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
  • Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart (1947), "The Enormous Womb"

• Do you want to learn holiness with terrible struggles and sore affliction and the plague of much remaining evil? Then wait before you turn to God.
  • Frederick William Robertson, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 486.

• "I will go today" is what a herdsman says; I will go tomorrow is what a shepherd-boy says. I will go is I will go, and the time passes.
  • Sumerian proverb, Collection III at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE.

• Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 8.

• Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012) Ch. 7. Naive Intervention, p. 122.

• Procrastination is the thief of time.
  • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night 1, Line 393