Procrastination

habitual or intentional delay of starting or finishing a task despite knowing potential negative consequences

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

Quotes

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  • I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
  • 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.
  • 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.


  • Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
  • 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.
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