Chapter 78அதிகாரம் 78 சோம்பல் Laziness

To those who sit and say ‘Tomorrow it will come’, tomorrow does come, but only as ‘tomorrow’.

The one who has worked lies down and gets up again; the idler lies down, and lies down, and goes down.

He stretches out his legs; and on the very day it falls due, the debt stretches out its legs.

Those who walk under a load press their footprints into the ground; those who stand without a load are buried.

For the sickness called ‘tomorrow’, even the medicine prescribed is tomorrow; the medicine’s name is ‘tomorrow’.

He said, ‘I will do it,’ and sat down. That sitting is sand heaped into a spring.

He sat in thought and did not rise: the thought itself was the rope that made the noose.

“I’ll lie down, just a little”: those words are the blameless door of a stone fortress.

The fortress is idleness, walled in stone. Its door is a phrase so harmless that nobody would blame it, and through it one walks in.

Water that is never stirred will rot; the mind of the idle, who never move, rots the same way.

She knows the land, she reads the water, she knows each kind of seed; the soil she has never known by touch.