Quotes About Leisure

What an abundance of leisure the person gains who is not looking over at what his neighbor is saying, doing, or thinking, but only at what he himself is doing, in order that he does what is just and respectful of the gods. As Agathon4 said, do not peer into the darkness of another's character, but run straight toward the finish line without straying from your path.

Nothing spoils idle pleasure like too much awareness

We see first of all that leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. It is not a vacuous interval. It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might be matured. Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man's ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself.

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the best, and that is your leisure - the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below.

It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place this world is when one is playing golf.

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.

All I want to do is go on with the unbridled life I lead here: barefoot, my faded bathing suit, an old jacket, lots of garlic, and swimming at all hours of the day. —COLETTE, AT SIXTY

Business first, then pleasure.

Retire from work, but not from life.

Other people just have fun. They have fun, and it comes naturally to them.

Men get lazy when life is too easy. Good minds go slack and good bodies get fat. Nine out of ten men in the ton have achieved nothing but the pursuit of pleasure.

am talking about this insane preoccupation with throwing balls of various shapes and sizes back and forth.

Reading for pleasure

In the economies of late capitalism leisure displaces labor, consumption displaces production, and commodities become the instruments of leisure, identity, and social relations.

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.

Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.

as they watched the people. After he left, they changed and jumped in the water for a lazy afternoon

Americans no longer experience vacations. They simply Sony them so they can ignore them for the rest of the year.

Lucien was sitting on his front porch, drinking

All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.

We live in a world of rights that has no sense of purpose; we live in a world of tolerance that has no sense of dignity for those tolerated or conscience concerning what is to be tolerated; we live in a world of leisure and squander it on empty pursuit; we live in a world of comfort and convenience where we can accumulate anything we want except that which matters most.

Perhaps I'd be happier if I had a boring job like Filly, but then I wouldn't have any time to myself. I waste so much time and then I resent it when I don't have time to waste.

Fine writing, next to doing nothing, is the best thing in the world.

How sad is it when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not.