quotations about leisure
In my mind nothing is more abhorrent than a life of ease. None of us has any right to ease. There is no place in civilization for the idler.
HENRY FORD
introduction, My Life and Work
Leisure is free activity in which men look at the value of reality, and without any utilitarian quest, without having to submit themselves to the rules of useful effort, let things be as they will.
RICARDO RODRIGUEZ-MARTOS
The Merchant Vessel: A Sociological Analysis
I am happiest when I am idle. I could live for months without performing any kind of labor, and at the expiration of that time I should feel fresh and vigorous enough to go right on in the same way for numerous more months.
ARTEMUS WARD
Artemus Ward in London and Other Papers
It's not a man's working hours that are important--it's his leisure hours. That's the mistake we all make.
AGATHA CHRISTIE
The Labours of Hercules
Leisure is central to the maintenance of society and to the development of a social space for the development of intimacy.
SHAUN BEST
Leisure Studies: Themes and Perspectives
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between her work and her play; her labor and her leisure; her mind and her body; her education and her recreation. She hardly knows which is which.
FRANCOIS RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND
New Woman, 1977
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Misalliance
Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy.
JOSEF PIEPER
Happiness and Contemplation
Our leisure is the time the devil seizes upon to make us work for him; and the only way we can avoid conscription into his ranks, is to keep all our leisure moments profitably employed.
JAMES ELLIS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Crome Yellow
The wise are never less at leisure than when at leisure.
SCIPIO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Leisure is not an activity, it's an attitude of mind. It's stepping outside strenuous effort and creating enough stillness so that it becomes possible to contemplate and enjoy things as they are.
JOSEF PIEPER
attributed, "Why Is Clinton Disliked?", New York Times, May 24, 2016
The early ascendancy of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honourable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from ignoble labour.
THORSTEIN VEBLEN
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Leisure is not just killing some hours, but a transformation of oneself.
KEN DYCHTWALD
"Retirement is even more fun than you've heard", Market Watch, May 29, 2016
Hijacked by the industrial revolution, leisure became something that was slotted into a couple of days per year when the worker bees were permitted to stroll around the city parks, so generously gifted to them by the great and the good. These leisure activities were, naturally, unpaid, just like many of those on the modern-day equivalent of "zero-hours" contracts. Now, leisure is seen merely as the absence of productivity, reduced to a politically-correct trope of "work/life balance". Leisure is now a bike, a tracksuit, a spin in Lycra-city at your local gym. Leisure is time off to recover and repair in order to get back on your bike and cycle to work. Leisure is industry.
VAL BURNS
"Make the most of your leisure time ... by doing nothing", Scotland Herald, May 28, 2016
For a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death -- the greatest leisure of all.
KENNETH CHURCH LAMOTT
Anti-California: Report from Our First Parafascist State
Leisure is the mother of philosophy; and commonwealth, the mother of peace and leisure.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
Leisure is empty time.
COUNTESS OF CARBERRY
attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
My conception of America is a land where men and women may walk in ordered freedom in the independent conduct of their occupations; where they may enjoy the advantages of wealth, not concentrated in the hands of the few but spread through the lives of all; where they build and safeguard their homes, and give to their children the fullest advantages and opportunities of American life; where every man shall be respected in the faith that his conscience and his heart direct him to follow; where a contented and happy people, secure in their liberties, free from poverty and fear, shall have the leisure and impulse to seek a fuller life.
HERBERT HOOVER
speech, Oct. 22, 1928
There's also a widening disparity in leisure. All Americans work fewer hours than they used to, but low earners work much less than before. Leisure inequality followed the opposite trend of income inequality, where the poor work less and the rich work more. More leisure time would seem to make the poor better off because leisure is presumed to be preferable to work. But it is not clear if the decline in work is voluntary or from fewer opportunities. If low earners are working less because they have fewer hours offered to them, more leisure is another indicator of polarization and families struggling to get by.
ALLISON SCHRAGER
"The inequality that matters most (hint: it's not income", Quartz, May 9, 2016