“On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.”

Page 23, 2004 Standard Edition.
The Knee of Listening

Source: Point Counter Point (1928), Ch. 17
Context: Ever since his mother’s second marriage Spandrell had always perversely made the worst of things, chosen the worst course, deliberately encouraged his own worst tendencies. It was with debauchery that he distracted his endless leisures. He was taking his revenge on her... He was spiting her, spiting himself, spiting God. He hoped there was a hell for him to go to and regretted his inability to believe in its existence.... it was even exciting in those early days to know that one was doing something bad and wrong. But there is in debauchery something so intrinsically dull, something so absolutely and hopelessly dismal, that it is only the rarest beings, gifted with much less than the usual amount of intelligence and much more than the usual intensity of appetite, who can go on actively enjoying a regular course of vice or continue actively to believe in its wickedness. Most habitual debauchees are debauchees not because they enjoy debauchery, but because they are uncomfortable when deprived of it. Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

Volume I, chapter II, section 17
The Stones of Venice (1853)

Wright Jr. 87 Years Behind the Black Curtain: An Autobiography. 1965

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 2013 Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order
2013
Variant: Democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve the sacred promises of human dignity, justice and peace

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 117

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Pearls of Wisdom