“The biggest waste is the waste of time.” – Theophrastus
A lot of people are unaware of how important time is. Being the one thing that cannot be halted or retrieved makes it one of the most valuable things in life.
Check out our collection of quotations about wasting time if you’re looking for some inspiration that will help you realize how important time really is.
Your time is really valuable, therefore you must use it wisely. Time management is crucial because of this. Make a plan for your activities and establish your priorities.
Here are a few of the greatest sayings on squandering time. They should motivate you to be more mindful of how you spend your time.
Wasting Time Inspirational Quotes
- “Your time is way too valuable to be wasting on people that can’t accept who you are.” – Turcois Ominek
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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)
- “He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.” – Dejan Stojanovic (The Sun Watches The Sun)
- “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
- “Telling some people not to waste time is a waste of time.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Life is lived in time. Therefore he who wastes time, wastes life.” – Vincent Okay Nwachukwu
- “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
- “We are wasting time. Time wastes itself. Who are we to float in its way?” – Iain M. Banks (The Algebraist)
- “Many people make the mistake of saving money by wasting time.” – J. R. Rim
- “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
- “When you waste one hour of your time, you have wasted your life.” – Sunday Adelaja
- “I have so much that I want to do. I hate wasting time.” – Stephen Hawking
- “You will need evidence to show the world that you didn’t waste your time here on earth.” – Sunday Adelaja
- “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.
- “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)
- “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
- “If time is of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.” – Benjamin Franklin
- “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
- “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
- “There will never be a point in my life where it is acceptable to waste time.” – Carlos Wallace
- “We only get one life. Wasting someone’s time is the subtlest form of murder.” – Lindy West
- “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that needs not to be done at all.” – Brian Tracy
- “When you spend time worrying, you’re simply using your imagination to create things you don’t want.” – Shannon L. Alder
- “I’m sick of wasting time on things that don’t matter.” – Alexandra Bracken (The Darkest Minds)
- “Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.” – E. A. Bucchianeri
- “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)
- “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)
- “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
- “I feel like I’m wasting time if I repeat myself.” – Heath Ledger
- “There’s no good way to waste your time. Wasting time is just wasting time.” – Helen Mirren
- “I’m not gonna waste your time, so I wouldn’t expect you to waste my time.” – Terrell Owens
- “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
- “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
- “Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.” – Art Buchwald
- “If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.” – James Richardson
- “If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.” – Rita Mae Brown
- “The less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.” – Lord Chesterfield
- “If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.” – Richard Miller
- “One of the greatest labor-saving inventions of today is tomorrow.” – Vincent T. Foss
- “Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.” – Mason Cooley
- “When there is a hill to climb, don’t think that waiting will make it smaller.” – Unknown
- “There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.” – Tom DeMarco
- “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
- “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off forever.” – P. J. Plauger
- “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” – William Shakespeare
- “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
- “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all.” – Brian Tracy
- “The trouble is that you think you have time.” – Jack Kornfield
- “Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode and it’s a waste of time.” – Don Roff
- “There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.” – Benjamin Disraeli
- “Tomorrow is the only day of the year that appeals to a lazy man.” – Jimmy Lyons
- “Wasting time is robbing oneself.” – Estonian Proverb
- “When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.” – Aiden Wilson Tozer
- “I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.” – Dean Kamen
- “Nothing is as fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” – William James
- “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” – Charles Darwin
- “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we know what to do with it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.” – Victor Hugo
- “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
- “Wasting time with the wrong person is just time wasted.” – Greg Behrendt
- “What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment?” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- “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
- “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
- “No point in wasting time with false vanity when you possess the real thing.” – Alan Bradley
- “Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.” – Auguste Rodin
- “For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “I learned many years ago never to waste time trying to convince my colleague.” – Albert Einstein
- “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” ― Bill Watterson
- “It’s bad enough wasting time without killing it.” – Norton Juster
- “When one pays a visit, it is for the purpose of wasting other people’s time, not one’s own.” – Oscar Wilde
- “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” – Bruce Lee
- “The biggest mistake you can make in life is to waste your time.” – Jerry Bruckner
- “A year from now you will wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb
- “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” – Mark Twain
- “Sometimes we waste too much time to think about someone who doesn’t even think about us for a second.” – Wiz Khalifa
- “One thing you can’t recycle is wasted time.” – Unknown
- “Be picky with who you invest your time in, wasted time is worse than wasted money.” – Unknown
- “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
- “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)
- “Stop wasting your time looking for the key to happiness… the door is open and unlocked… just walk through it.” – Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You)
- “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
- “Work on purpose, play on purpose, rest on purpose. Do not let yourself or anyone else waste your time.” – Izey Victoria Odiase
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Do not waste time attempting to make sense out of nonsense.” – Johnnie Dent, Jr.
- “Finish the most important tasks and stop wasting time on irrelevant activities.” – Sunday Adelaja
- “Don’t waste your time chasing things that will never be beneficial to your future.” – April Mae Monterrosa
- “Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” – Napoleon Hill
- “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
- “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
- “Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.” – Jane Austen
- “Procrastination is the thief of time.” – Edward Young
- “Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.” – Robert Byrne
- “A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.” – Charles Dickens
- “The best way to fill time is to waste it.” – Marguerite Duras
- “You can’t turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again.” – Bonnie Prudden
- “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” – Bertrand Russell
- “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
- “Half the time men think they are talking business, they are wasting time.” – E. W. Howe
- “I’m reading this because time isn’t going to kill itself.” – Unknown
- “Sleeping is not time wasting.” – Unknown
111.”Patience is a waste of time.” – Unknown
- “I would rather prefer wasting the time in planning my work over losing the time in working my plan.” – Dr. P. S. Jagadeesh Kumar
- “I wish I could invoice people for wasting my time.” – Unknown
- “I don’t have time or crayons to explain myself to you.” – Unknown
- “Time spent reading a book, even a bad one, is never wasted.” – Stewart Stafford
Because time is of the essence and life is fleeting, don’t waste another moment of it. And never waste your valuable time on individuals who don’t deserve it.
We hope these insightful, humorous, and inspirational quotations about wasting time will help you make better use of your time.