Count Ayakura’s abstraction persisted. He believed that only a vulgar mentality was willing to acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes. However precipitous the future...

Tolerance never exists without negative judgment. It is the sentiment of having a negative opinion about something yet still putting up with it.

If I can delay your action with my inaction, then I’ll gladly do nothing for the good of the no good.

We must remember balance and moderation. Patience can be spiritually enriching and virtuous… but when taken in excess, it turns to procrastination, the poison of inaction.

But it was not real freedom, he realised. It was the freedom that comes from lack of choice and moreover, was the kind that only came with decisions delayed. It was a freedom of inaction.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which...

You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in...

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

Free yourself from the need to blame others. There are two reasons that you are where you are right now; action or inaction.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction

Is multilateralism nothing more than a dodge for simple inaction?

The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.