Eugene Delacroix on laziness as the greatest enemy to the development of one’s faculties

    About laziness being the greatest enemy to the development of our faculties Eugene Delacroix wrote:

With the majority of men, the intelligence is a field that lies fallow for almost all their lives. Seeing the multitude of stupid or at least mediocre people who seem to live only to vegetate, one has the right to be astonished that God should have given reason to his creatures, the faculty of imagining, of comparing, of combining, etc., to produce such small fruit. Laziness, ignorance, a passing situation, or chance throws them out of their course, and changes almost all men into passive instruments of circumstance.
We never know what we can get out of ourselves. Laziness is undoubtedly the greatest enemy to the development of our faculties. And so, know thyself would be the fundamental axiom of every society in which each of its members would perform his role exactly and would fulfill it to its limit. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 293.)
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    For a brief biography of Eugene Delacroix, click here.