“The biggest waste is the waste of time.” – Theophrastus
Many people don’t understand the importance of time. It’s one of the most precious things in life because it’s the only thing that can not be stopped or recovered.
If you are looking for some motivational quotes that will help you understand the true importance of time, check out our collection of wasting time quotes.
You have to spend your time wisely because it’s truly valuable. That’s why time management is also important. Plan your activities and decide what are priorities.
Below you have some of the best quotes about wasting time. Hopefully, they’ll inspire you to pay more attention to how you spend your time.
Wasting time inspirational quotes
1. “Your time is way too valuable to be wasting on people that can’t accept who you are.” – Turcois Ominek
2. “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” – Jack London
3. “When it comes to love and loss, acceptance is never easy. We can’t make someone see all we have to give, make them love us, or make them change. All we can do is move on and stop wasting time.” – April Mae Monterrosa
4. “If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.” – Margaret Thatcher
5. “How tragic it is to find that an entire lifetime is wasted in pursuit of distractions while purpose is neglected.” – Sunday Adelaja (How To Become Great Through Time Conversion)
6. “He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.” – Dejan Stojanovic (The Sun Watches The Sun)
7. “Sometimes exhaustion is not a result of too much time spent on something, but of knowing that in its place, no time is spent on something else.” – Joyce Rachelle
8. “Telling some people not to waste time is a waste of time.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
9. “When you understand that through the power of conversion in solitude you can become great, so many things you’ve been wasting your time on will no longer interest you. You will even run away from some friends.” – Sunday Adelaja
10. “If you are reading this then you have wasted another day of your life daydreaming, rather than planning the life God intended you to live.” – Shannon L. Alder
11. “Moving on will show you a lot about who you are, what you truly want and what you have no desire to waste your time on.” – April Mae Monterrosa
12. “Your time keeps flying away into vanity while you dine with your distractions. Your life keeps diminishing while you waste your time feeding your distractions.” – Sunday Adelaja
13. “Life is lived in time. Therefore he who wastes time, wastes life.” – Vincent Okay Nwachukwu
14. “I know so much pressure is on all of us to waste time and to just trivialize it. There is so much pressure on us to try to overcome boredom by spending time on frivolities.” – Sunday Adelaja
15. “We are wasting time. Time wastes itself. Who are we to float in its way?” – Iain M. Banks (The Algebraist)
16. “Many people make the mistake of saving money by wasting time.” – J. R. Rim
17. “If you understand that a wasted time is a wasted life, you will start running away from television, you will begin to run away from movies, you will run away from games like Criminal Case and Candy Crush.” – Sunday Adelaja
18. “When you waste one hour of your time, you have wasted your life.” – Sunday Adelaja
19. “I have so much that I want to do. I hate wasting time.” – Stephen Hawking
20. “You will need evidence to show the world that you didn’t waste your time here on earth.” – Sunday Adelaja
21. “We all have the same 24/7. What we do with our time, becomes our priority. Avoid priorities by default.” – Patt Hollinger Pickett, Ph.D.
22. “If there’s something I’m not good at, it’s usually because I just organically despise it. I can’t help that. I’m fabulous at too many other things to waste my time faking it.” – Crystal Woods (Write Like No One Is Reading 2)
23. “If you honor the moments by not wasting them, the Time will honor you back by remembering you as the hero, for the rest of the time to come.” – Amit Kalantri
24. “If time is of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.” – Benjamin Franklin
25. “All mental hygiene is based on the core practice of doing nothing. Most of us are good at wasting time, staring at the wall while telling ourselves we should be working. We call this doing nothing, but our brains are furiously active. We think constantly, and our thinking is often rife with distress.” – Martha Beck
26. “Your time and your true relevance are just like your shadow, the more you take steps into the darkness, the more they disappear!” – Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
27. “There will never be a point in my life where it is acceptable to waste time.” – Carlos Wallace
28. “We only get one life. Wasting someone’s time is the subtlest form of murder.” – Lindy West
29. “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that needs not to be done at all.” – Brian Tracy
30. “When you spend time worrying, you’re simply using your imagination to create things you don’t want.” – Shannon L. Alder
31. “I’m sick of wasting time on things that don’t matter.” – Alexandra Bracken (The Darkest Minds)
32. “Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.” – E. A. Bucchianeri
33. “Thinking before taking actions is useful only if you are going to take action, otherwise you are wasting time and insulting your mind.” – Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
34. “When the time comes for you to leave this earth, if it doesn’t become a lesser place with your absence, then you have wasted your life.” – Shaun Hick (The Army of Five Men)
35. “I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men – although the sum total of men’s learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.” – Girolamo Cardano
36. “I feel like I’m wasting time if I repeat myself.” – Heath Ledger
37. “There’s no good way to waste your time. Wasting time is just wasting time.” – Helen Mirren
38. “I’m not gonna waste your time, so I wouldn’t expect you to waste my time.” – Terrell Owens
39. “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” – Jack London
40. “I love the Internet, and I love wasting time on the Internet – even though it sometimes ends up not being a waste of time.” – Claire Cameron
41. “Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.” – Art Buchwald
42. “If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.” – James Richardson
43. “If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.” – Rita Mae Brown
44. “The less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.” – Lord Chesterfield
45. “If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.” – Richard Miller
46. “One of the greatest labor-saving inventions of today is tomorrow.” – Vincent T. Foss
47. “Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.” – Mason Cooley
48. “When there is a hill to climb, don’t think that waiting will make it smaller.” – Unknown
49. “There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.” – Tom DeMarco
50. “Don’t fool yourself that important things can be put off until tomorrow; they can be put off forever, or not at all.” – Mignon McLaughlin
51. “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off forever.” – P. J. Plauger
52. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” – William Shakespeare
53. “Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.” – Roberto Clemente
54. “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all.” – Brian Tracy
55. “The trouble is that you think you have time.” – Jack Kornfield
56. “Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode and it’s a waste of time.” – Don Roff
57. “There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.” – Benjamin Disraeli
58. “Tomorrow is the only day of the year that appeals to a lazy man.” – Jimmy Lyons
59. “Wasting time is robbing oneself.” – Estonian Proverb
60. “When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.” – Aiden Wilson Tozer
61. “I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.” – Dean Kamen
62. “Nothing is as fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” – William James
63. “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” – Charles Darwin
64. “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we know what to do with it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
65. “Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.” – Victor Hugo
66. “My life hasn’t been perfect, yet I’ve never wasted my time envying anyone else. If something wasn’t the best it could be – I made it better.” – Aleatha Romig
67. “Wasting time with the wrong person is just time wasted.” – Greg Behrendt
68. “What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment?” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
69. “Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.” – Denis Waitley
70. “The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!” – George Bernard Shaw
71. “No point in wasting time with false vanity when you possess the real thing.” – Alan Bradley
72. “Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.” – Auguste Rodin
73. “For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
74. “I learned many years ago never to waste time trying to convince my colleague.” – Albert Einstein
75. “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” ― Bill Watterson
76. “It’s bad enough wasting time without killing it.” – Norton Juster
77. “When one pays a visit, it is for the purpose of wasting other people’s time, not one’s own.” – Oscar Wilde
78. “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” – Bruce Lee
79. “The biggest mistake you can make in life is to waste your time.” – Jerry Bruckner
80. “A year from now you will wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb
81. “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” – Mark Twain
82. “Sometimes we waste too much time to think about someone who doesn’t even think about us for a second.” – Wiz Khalifa
83. “One thing you can’t recycle is wasted time.” – Unknown
84. “Be picky with who you invest your time in, wasted time is worse than wasted money.” – Unknown
85. “Decide who you are and what your goals entail – then go for the roses. Life has little regard for those who waste time.” – Jon Huntsman, Sr.
Stop wasting your time quotes
86. “Your hand can seize today, but not tomorrow; and thoughts of your tomorrow are nothing but desire. Don’t waste this breath, if your heart isn’t crazy, since ‘the rest of your life’ won’t last forever.” – Omar Khayyám (Quatrains – Ballades)
87. “Stop wasting your time looking for the key to happiness… the door is open and unlocked… just walk through it.” – Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You)
88. “To truly be satisfied in life, you must invest your time into doing what you were born to do instead of wasting your time trying to impress a boss or a company doing a job that you were not born for.” – Sunday Adelaja
89. “Work on purpose, play on purpose, rest on purpose. Do not let yourself or anyone else waste your time.” – Izey Victoria Odiase
90. “Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.” – Unknown
91. “Stop wasting time getting upset at those who criticize your life! It’s always someone who has no idea of the price you paid to get to where you are today.” – Unknown
92. “Don’t waste your whole lifetime waiting for the perfect life when there’s a perfectly good one within and right in front of you.” – Rasheed Ogunlaru
93. “Do not waste time attempting to make sense out of nonsense.” – Johnnie Dent, Jr.
94. “Finish the most important tasks and stop wasting time on irrelevant activities.” – Sunday Adelaja
95. “Don’t waste your time chasing things that will never be beneficial to your future.” – April Mae Monterrosa
96. “Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” – Napoleon Hill
97. “There’s no reason to waste time trying to prove who you are to people that don’t even know who they are.” – Pastor YPJ
98. “Don’t live in the past. There’s no point. You can’t change anything. What a waste of time.” – Bob Newhart
Funny wasting time quotes
99. “Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.” – Jane Austen
100. “Procrastination is the thief of time.” – Edward Young
101. “Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.” – Robert Byrne
102. “A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.” – Charles Dickens
103. “The best way to fill time is to waste it.” – Marguerite Duras
104. “You can’t turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again.” – Bonnie Prudden
105. “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” – Bertrand Russell
106. “The future is shaped by your dreams, so stop wasting time and go to sleep!” – Unknown
107.”Always postpone meetings with time-wasting morons.” – Unknown
108. “Half the time men think they are talking business, they are wasting time.” – E. W. Howe
109. “I’m reading this because time isn’t going to kill itself.” – Unknown
110. “Sleeping is not time wasting.” – Unknown
111.”Patience is a waste of time.” – Unknown
112. “I would rather prefer wasting the time in planning my work over losing the time in working my plan.” – Dr. P. S. Jagadeesh Kumar
113. “I wish I could invoice people for wasting my time.” – Unknown
114. “I don’t have time or crayons to explain myself to you.” – Unknown
115. “Time spent reading a book, even a bad one, is never wasted.” – Stewart Stafford
Don’t waste a second of your life wasting time because life is short and every second is precious. And never let people who don’t deserve it, waste your precious time.
We hope our collection of inspirational, wise, and funny wasting time quotes inspired you to use time more effectively.
