Popular quotes about Leisure! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Society of leisure perhaps? Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labour to leisure. Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon. The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.
Henri LefebvreThe only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.
Ezra PoundI do leisure reading but I don't get to do it like, at one in the morning. When I getting up at six in the morning, so I do most of my leisure reading on vacation and on airplanes and that sort of stuff.
Susan RiceIt used to be that wealthy people were the leisure class, and having time off was a status symbol. That's switched now: being busy and overworked is the reality for many white-collar workers, and there's a kind of perverse currency to that, competitive busy-ness. At the other end of the income scale, there's a swath of lower-wage workers who are underemployed or unemployed, with too much unwanted leisure, and zero status for that. For shift workers, devices mean they're accessible in ways they weren't before, susceptible to that call from the boss to log more hours.
Katrina OnstadThere can be no education without leisure; and without leisure, education is worthless.
Sarah Josepha HaleRead at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.
Marcus Tullius CiceroWe are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.
Gerald BrenanAmericans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
Anthony BurgessA truly good book attracts very little favor to itself. It is so true that it teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read. It creates no atmosphere in which it may be perused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. It confers on me such wealth that I lay it down with regret. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.
Henry David ThoreauTo understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and he is by no means to be accounted useless or idle, who has stored his mind with acquired knowledge, and can detail it occasionally to others who have less leisure or weaker abilities.
Samuel JohnsonIn winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are halfconcealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.... We enjoy now, not an Oriental, but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams.
Henry David ThoreauI confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.
Aldo LeopoldToo many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing - too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person's capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart remains unfulfilled.
Stephen CoveyWhen you master role-playing [gaming], you become immersed in an activity that is peerless among leisure-time pursuits.
Gary GygaxWhere people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. They were poor because these overworked people soon wore out -- they became less and less valuable as workers. Therefore, they earned less and less and could buy less and less.
Henry FordImitation is often a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability or the time to work out an independent solution. People in a hurry will imitate more readily than people at leisure. Hustling thus tends to produce uniformity. And in the deliberate fusing of individuals into a compact group, incessant action will play a considerable role.
Eric HofferSolitude is the surest nurse of all prurient passions, and a girl in the hurry of preparation, or tumult of gaiety, has neither inclination nor leisure to let tender expressions soften or sink into her heart. The ball, the show, are not the dangerous places: no, 'tis the private friend, the kind consoler, the companion of the easy vacant hour, whose compliance with her opinions can flatter her vanity, and whose conversation can sooth, without ever stretching her mind, that is the lover to be feared: he who buzzes in her ear at court, or at the opera, must be contented to buzz in vain.
Samuel JohnsonRepose, 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. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition.
Josef PieperWe must move from ... the primacy of technology toward considerations of social justice and equity, from the dictates of organizational convenience toward the aspirations ofself realization and learning, from authoritarianism and dogmatism toward more participation, from uniformity and centralization toward diversity and pluralism, from the concept of work as hard and unavoidable, from life as nasty, brutish, and short toward work as purpose and self~fulfillment, a recognition of leisure as a valid activity in itself.
Warren G. BennisPeople have become shallower. They view spending, entertaining, seeking leisure and enjoying as the main objectives of their life.
Zhang YimouLetters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.
Agnes RepplierThe coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.
Gilbert K. ChestertonWhy should any of these things that happen externally distract thee? Give thyself leisure to learn some good thing: cease roving to and fro.
Marcus AureliusLike 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 HuxleyWhite privilege allows a certain kind of leisure that can be deployed by white people of advantage toward our restoration. That's all true and good. But it also suggests that there is an individual approach to the issues that many of these white people have taken up as a recognition of their tie to and responsibility for some of the inequities that exist. And I don't think it has to be an either-or. I think it has to be a bifocal approach.
Michael Eric DysonAny reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.
James MadisonNow therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former opinions.
Rene DescartesI sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came alongโฆand then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the โdark agesโ!
Arthur C. ClarkeA third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.
Bill BrysonThere is no place in the world, I imagine, for a philosopher with a sense of humor, a new leisure, and an inquiring turn of mind!
Mary Roberts RinehartIs there a choice in life? It's always been like this. I am jealous that you have a lot of leisure and free time. You are jealous that I have a lot money.
Yao MingLeisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.
Fulton J. SheenBreakfast cereals that come in the same colors as polyester leisure suits make oversleeping a virtue.
Fran LebowitzEinstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted.
Havelock EllisWherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attraction fades quickly - it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation.
Pope Benedict XVIThe true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer
Thomas MertonNothing makes God more supreme and more central in worship than when a people are utterly persuaded that nothing - not money or prestige or leisure or family or job or health or sports or toys or friends - nothing is going to bring satisfaction to their sinful, guilty, aching hearts besides God.
John PiperYour job today tells me nothing of your future--your use of your leisure today tells me just what your tomorrow will be.
Robert H. JacksonWhat does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.
Samuel Gompers