Quotes about vacation

„It was a perpetual holiday – and what an assortment of people. You could still enjoy yourself in those days! Machinery didn't take up the whole of life; there was time for living, and we made the most of it... I found as many magnificent girls to paint as I wanted; in those days one wasn't reduced to following a little model around for an hour and then being treated as a disgusting old man at the end of it.“

—  Pierre-Auguste Renoir French painter and sculptor 1841 - 1919

Source: undated quotes, p. 28 : Renoir's quote to Vollard referring to the Isle Grenouillere, where he painted in 1869, together with Claude Monet.

„The Nazi appealed to the socialist traditions of German labor, declaring the worker ‘a pillar of the community,’ and the ‘bourgeois’—along with the traditional aristocracy—a doomed class. Hitler, who told associates that he was a ‘socialist,’ had the party adopt the red flag and, on coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday; Nazi Party members were ordered to address one another as ‘comrades (Genossen). His conception of the part was, like Lenin’s, that of a militant organization a Kampfbund, or ‘Combat League.“

—  Richard Pipes American historian 1923 - 2018

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 260

„I don't do it for the money
There's bills that I can't pay
I don't do it for the glory
I just do it anyway.
Providing for our future's my responsibility.
Yeah I'm real good under pressure
Being all that I can be.And I can't call in sick on Mondays
When the weekends been too strong
I just work straight through the holidays
And sometimes all night long
You can bet that I stand ready when the wolf growls at the door
Hey, I'm solid, hey I'm steady, hey, I'm true down to the core.“

—  Toby Keith American country music singer and actor 1961

American Soldier, written with Chuck Cannon
Song lyrics, Shock'n Y'all (2003)

„Love your self's self where it lives.
There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,
why did I let you grow
in another place. You did not know my voice
when I came back to call. All the superlatives
of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe
will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.“

—  Anne Sexton poet from the United States 1928 - 1974

"The Double Image"
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

„When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness'... because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity... And then I used to ask: Why do men forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.“

—  Colin Wilson author 1931 - 2013

Source: The Black Room (1975), p. 75

„As you know Gallas had an unbelievable holiday. I hope he enjoyed it very much in Guadeloupe, which I think is a fantastic place to be on holiday, so he wanted to stay there for a long time."[On William Gallas missing the first team's trip to the United States because he was on holiday. ]“

—  José Mourinho Portuguese association football player and manager 1963

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/funny_old_game/7004282.stm
Chelsea FC

„Every year right after the Christmas holidays, our IQ scores were posted on the bulletin board at the Academy. We, the juniors and seniors, had taken our tests several weeks ago, and for the last few days we were all nervous wrecks waiting to see our results. Of course, we were all told that what was really crucial for us to get into the college of our choice was the grade point average of our last two years of high school, plus our SAT scores. But we knew that our IQ score could also make a big difference because our IQ, we’d been told, was what gave us a true measure of our intelligence. So if we hadn’t worked real hard in school or hadn’t tested well in our college entrance exams, then our IQ could make all the difference.“

—  Victor Villaseñor American writer 1940

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

„Someone once asked me what my working timetable was like and when was the last time I went on a holiday. I said about 20 years back. I don’t work anymore, because I get paid to do what I like most. So it’s like a paid holiday.“

—  Kamal Haasan Indian actor 1954

Kamal Hassan: A universal legend

„They [the holiday-visitors near Le Havre] love my little ladies [paintings] on the beach, and some people say that there's a thread of gold to exploit there.“

—  Eugène Boudin French painter 1824 - 1898

Quote in Boudin's letter to family-friend Ferdinand Martin, from Paris, 12 February 1863; as cited by Colin B. Bailey in The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, publisher, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 11
1850s - 1870s

„In July, my father left to take the waters; he left me with my mother and older brother at the mercy of the summer days, white from the heat and stunning. Stupefied by the light, we leafed through that great book of the holiday, in which the pages were ablaze with splendour, their sickly sweet pulp, deep within, made from golden pears.“

—  Bruno Schulz Polish novelist and painter 1892 - 1942

“August” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/august1.htm
His father, The seasons

„He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spent ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air everyday.“

—  Terry Pratchett, book Equal Rites

Source: Equal Rites

„But that great struggle was carried on by those whom this day is set apart to commemorate, not only for the preservation of the Union. The authority of the Federal Government had been resisted by armed force. They were also striving to restore peace. It must be remembered that our Republic was organized to avoid and discourage war, and to promote and establish peace. It is the leading characteristic of our national holidays that they are days of peace. The ways of our people are the ways of peace. They naturally seek ways to make peace more secure.“

—  Calvin Coolidge American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929) 1872 - 1933

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

„I am not the official Church Jesus who is accepted by policemen, bankers, judges, executioners, officers, church bosses, politicians and similar representatives of power. I am not your Superstar who keeps playing his part for you on the cross, and whom you hit in the face when he steps out of his role, and who therefore cannot call out to you, "I am fed up with all your pomp and all your rituals! Your incense is disgusting. It stinks of burnt human flesh. I can't bear your holy celebrations and holidays any longer. You can pray as much as you like, I'm not listening. Keep all your idiotic honours and laudations. I won't have anything to do with them. I do not want them. I am no pillar of peace and security. Security that you achieve with tear gas and with billy clubs. I am no guarantee for obedience and order either. Order and obedience at reform schools, prisons, penal institutions, insane asylums. I am the disobedient one, the restless one who does not live in any house. Nor am I a guarantee for success, savings accounts and possessions. I am the homeless one without a permanent home who stirs up trouble wherever he goes. I am the agitator, the invoker, I am the scream. I am the hippie, bum, Black Power, Jesus people. I want to free the prisoners. I want to make the blind see. I want to redeem the tortured. I want to cast love into your hearts, the love that reaches out beyond everything that exists. I want to turn you into living human beings, immortals.“

—  Klaus Kinski German actor 1926 - 1991

Jesus Christus Erlöser (1971)

„I find it a sufficient embarrassment that our Establishment Clause jurisprudence regarding holiday displays has come to 'require[e] scrutiny more commonly associated with interior decorators than with the judiciary'. But interior decorating is a rock hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.“

—  Antonin Scalia former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 1936 - 2016

Lee v. Weisman (1992, dissenting) ; decided June 24, 1992
1990s

„There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist.“

—  Elfriede Jelinek, book The Piano Teacher

P 29
The Piano Teacher (1988)

„On the eve of its coming to power, industrial workers composed nearly one-third of the Nazi Party membership and constituted its largest occupational groups. The party adopted the Red Flag, declared May 1 a paid national holiday, and required its members to address one another as Genossen or ‘comrades.“

—  Richard Pipes American historian 1923 - 2018

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 220

„The statement is made with certainty: a festival that does not get its life from worship, even though the connection in human consciousness be ever so small, is not to be found. To be sure, since the French Revolution, people have tried over and over to create artificial festivals without any connection with religious worship, or even against such worship, such as the "Brutus Festival" or "Labor Day," but they all demonstrate, through the forced and narrow character of their festivity, what religious worship provides to a festival. […] Clearer than the light of day is the difference between the living, rooted trees of genuine cultic festival and our artificial festivals that resemble those "maypoles," cut at the roots, and carted here and there, to be planted for some definite purpose. Of course we may have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we are only at the dawn of an age of artificial festivals. Were we [in Germany] prepared for the possibility that the official forces, and especially the bearers of political power, would artificially create the appearance of the festive with so huge an expense in external arrangements? And that this seductive, scarcely delectable appearance of artificial "holidays" would be so totally lacking in the essential quality, that true and ultimate harmony with the world? And that such holidays would in fact depend on the suppression of that harmony and derive their dangerous seduction from that very fact?“

—  Josef Pieper German philosopher 1904 - 1997

In the three rhetorical questions that end this quote, Pieper alludes to the Nazis' elaborately stage-managed "festivals", in particular the Nuremberg Rally, the subject of Leni Riefenstahl's classic propaganda documentary, Triumph of the Will.
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, pp. 51–52

„I just want to go back to rockin', but I'm uncertain as to what to actually do … The truth is, I never stopped thinking about rock 'n' roll for a second that I'm on holiday.“

—  Joe Strummer British musician, singer, actor and songwriter 1952 - 2002

„Now it is not our purpose here to condemn this world, from the standpoint of some "holiday-world" of philosophy. No words need be wasted on saying that this work-a-day world is very much with us, that in it the foundations of our physical existence are secured, without which no one can philosophize at all! Nevertheless, let us also recall, that among the voices which fill the workplace and the markets ("How do you get this or that item of daily existence?" "Where do you get that?" etc.) — in the midst of all these voices suddenly one calls above the rest: "Why is there anything at all, and not nothing?" — asking that age-old question, which Heidegger called the basic question of all metaphysics! Must we explicitly state how unfathomable this philosopher's question is, in comparison with that everyday world of needs and purposefulness? If such a question as this were asked, without introduction or interpretation, in the company of those people of efficiency and success, wouldn't the questioner be considered rather … mad?“

—  Josef Pieper German philosopher 1904 - 1997

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 66—67