Leisure Quotes

Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

Time is a game played beautifully by children.

~ Heraclitus

The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof.

~ John Stuart Mill

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. 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 Pieper

Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by conservationists and wilderness lovers. As I was always aware, my friends the coon hunters were not motivated just by the wish to tree coons and listen to hounds and listen to each other, all of which were sufficiently attractive; they were coon hunters also because they wanted to be afoot in the woods at night. Most of the farmers I have known, and certainly the most interesting ones, have had the capacity to ramble about outdoors for the mere happiness of it, alert to the doings of the creatures, amused by the sight of a fox catching grasshoppers, or by the puzzle of wild tracks in the snow.

~ Wendell Berry

The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.

~ Amit Kalantri

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows...

~ W.h. Davies

What is this life so full of care,We don't have time to stand and stare.

~ W.h. Davies

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. She simply pursues her vision of excellence through whatever she is doing, and leaves others to determine if she is working or playing. To herself, she always appears to be doing both.

~ François-René De Chateaubriand

I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.

~ Masanobu Fukuoka

Above a certain level of income, the relative value of material consumption vis-a-vis leisure time is diminished, so earning a higher income at the cost of working longer hours may reduce the quality of your life. More importantly, the fact that the citizens of a country work longer than others in comparable countries does not necessarily mean that they like working longer hours. They may be compelled to work long hours, even if they actually want to take longer holidays.

~ Ha-Joon Chang

Although I understand that all days are equal with 24 hours each, most of us agree that Friday is the longest day of the week and Sunday the shortest!

~ D.s. Mixell

Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.

~ Anne Brontë

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

~ Dorothy Allison

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

~ Wilkie Collins

I've learned one thing, and that's to quit worrying about stupid things. You have four years to be irresponsible here, relax. Work is for people with jobs. You'll never remember class time, but you'll remember the time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So stay out late. Go out with your friends on a Tuesday when you have a paper due on Wednesday. Spend money you don't have. Drink 'til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does...

~ Tom Petty

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

~ Wendell Berry

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

~ Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.

~ J.g. Ballard

To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,To lie flat and know nothing and be still,Are the two trades of man; and which is worseI know not, but I know that both are ill.

~ A.e. Housman

Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.

~ Josef Pieper

We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.

~ Wendell Berry

To resist the social pressure now put even on one's leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one's own way, than ever before.

~ Robert Graves

Few endeavors, if any at all, I find to be inherently mature or inherently immature. Maturity is neither defined by one's particular preferences nor by one's particular activities; rather, it is defined by the strength of one's character.

~ Criss Jami

Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create.Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life...Modern scientific agriculture, on the other hand, has no such vision. Research wanders about aimlessly, each researcher seeing just one part of the infinite array of natural factors which affect harvest yields.Even though it is the same quarter acre, the farmer must grow his crops differently each year in accordance with variations in weather, insect populations, the condition of the soil, and many other natural factors. Nature is everywhere in perpetual motion; conditions are never exactly the same in any two years.Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experiences. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer.

~ Masanobu Fukuoka

Be so free that nothing more than your future can distract your attention.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Habitual excuses for inactivity indicates little or no interest in what one ought to have done.

~ Itohan Eghide

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.

~ George Macdonald

Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.

~ Dallas Willard

Business is leisure when you find pleasure in it.

~ Peter Adejimi

Your previous accomplishments should be your stepping stones, you need them to jump up. They should not become beds that should keep you comfortably sleeping.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Any idea that takes away sweet sleeps from you will eventually bring to you sweet life. Be diligent and willing to stay awake until your good is better and your better becomes excellent!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Stress is equivalent to weapons of mass destruction armed for wrong reasons. The difference is that, it is less costly as compared to the atomic bombs! However, it destroys faster!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Stop over-loading yourself with numberless tasks. Give time to yourself for rest and positive deliberations. You can’t think better and plan better when you are under stress!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Measurement aside, there are two reasons aggregate growth might matter. The first is to create jobs to assimilate the unemployed and anticipate increases in population. The second is to improve living standards. Economic logic does not require overall expansion to achieve either of these objectives. An expanding labour force can be accommodated if hours of work fall. And it's productivity growth, rather than the overall size of the economy, that drives improvements in living standards. Getting bigger doesn't necessarily yield wealth; improving productivity does.

~ Juliet Schor

Like every other good thing in thisworld, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however,it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us beduly thankful for that, my dear Denis--duly thankful.

~ Aldous Huxley

A life of leisure never satisfies anyone who possesses a lively mind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or resting after the heat of the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth.

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

Even their downtime was epic.

~ Robert Kurson