Selected leisure quotes

1. You have a right to enjoy life, but only on your own time.

2. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

3. If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.

4. No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.

5. What do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace.

6. Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.

7. [Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

8. A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

9. I go to bed early; my favorite dream comes on at nine.

10. If all our national holidays were observed on Wednesdays, we could wind up with nine-day weekends.

11. Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

12. Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

13. Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God's blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.

14. By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

15. What's drinking? A mere pause from thinking!

16. The best way to fill time is to waste it.

17. What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?

18. In our leisure we reveal what kind of people we are.

19. That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.

20. Visits are insatiable devourers of time, and fit only for those who, if they did not that, would do nothing.

21. The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

22. Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television.

23. I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound largemouth bass in my lake.

24. 'Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.'

25. Leisure is the mother of philosophy.

26. The Englishman never enjoys himself except for a noble purpose. He does not play cricket because it is a good game, but because it creates good citizens. He does not love motor-races for their own sake, but for the advantages they bring to the engineering firms of his country. And it is common knowledge that the devoted persons who conduct and regularly attend horse-races do not do so because they like it, but for the benefit of the breed of the English horse.

27. Seated one day at the organ, I was weary and ill at ease, And my fingers wandered idly Over the noisy keys.

28. And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

29. If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people. (5 November 1958)

30. If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively. For people to have more time to read, to take part in their civic obligations, to know more about how their government functions and who their officials are might mean in a democracy a great improvement in the democratic processes. Let's begin, then, to think how we can prepare old and young for these new opportunities. Let's not wait until they come upon us suddenly and we have a crisis that we will be ill prepared to meet. (5 November 1958)

31. And add to these retired Leisure, That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.

32. The purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place to spend one's leisure.

33. [When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

34. Is not true leisure One with true toil?

35. Leisure is the exultation of the possible.

36. Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.

37. 'The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.'

38. This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that Labour disagrees with me in that. On this matter I am a crusted Tory. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says 'there is no wisdom without leisure.'

39. 'Let's see if I've got this straight,' he returned. It was a phrase of hers that he had adopted 'It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there's this couple lying naked in bed reading the Enclyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time or don't they?'

40. Men spend their time chasing a ball or a hare; it is the very sport of kings. (141)

41. Wasting time has an esthetics to it.

42. I would hope that understanding and reconciliation are not limited to the 19th hole alone.

43. It is a great art to saunter.

44. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

45. Petition me no petitions, sir, to-day; Let other hours be set apart for business. Today it is our pleasure to be drunk; And this our queen shall be as drunk as we.

46. A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

47. Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure.

48. '...it is not when he is working in his office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, 'Life is beautiful.'' (p. 2)

49. If you spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

50. Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.

51. Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

52. A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

53. For 'im that doth not work must surely die; But that's no reason man should labour all 'Is life on one same shift - life's none so long.

54. I work until beer o'clock.

55. Whilst playing cards,