Quotes about leisure (294 quotes, page 3)

“When . . . some leisurely passer-by stopped . . . and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

"A Hunger Artist"
The Complete Stories (1971)

Hunger , Lie , World , Way

“It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 56
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Life , Art , Intelligence , Suffering

“Sure you have made me passing glad
That you your mind so soon removed,
Before that I the leisure had
To choose you for my best beloved”

William Byrd (1543–1623) British composer

Poem: The Faithless Shepherdess http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-faithless-shepherdess/

“The lower classes of people in Europe may at some future period be much better instructed then they are at present; they may be taught to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at the ale-house; they may live under better and more equal laws than they have hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it possible, though not probable, that they may have more leisure; but it is not in the nature of things, that they can be awarded such a quantity of money or substance, as will allow them all to marry early, in the full confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous family.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter XIV, paragraph 9

Money , People , Family , Law

“Almost all medieval Muslim historians credit their heroes with desecration of Hindu idols and/or destruction of Hindu temples. The picture that emerges has the following components, depending upon whether the iconoclast was in a hurry on account of Hindu resistance or did his work at leisure after a decisive victory:
1. The idols were mutilated or smashed or burnt or melted down if they were made of precious metals.
2. Sculptures in relief on walls and pillars were disfigured or scraped away or torn down.
3. Idols of stone and inferior metals or their pieces were taken away, sometimes by cartloads, to be thrown down before the main mosque in (a) the metropolis of the ruling Muslim sultan and (b) the holy cities of Islam, particularly Mecca, Medina and Baghdad.
4. There were instances of idols being turned into lavatory seats or handed over to butchers to be used as weights while selling meat.
5. Brahmin priests and other holy men in and around the temple were molested or murdered.
6. Sacred vessels and scriptures used in worship were defiled and scattered or burnt.
7. Temples were damaged or despoiled or demolished or burnt down or converted into mosques with some structural alterations or entire mosques were raised on the same sites mostly with temple materials.
8. Cows were slaughtered on the temple sites so that Hindus could not use them again.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Men , Decision , Victory , Dependency

“Historically, it may be useful to fancy playfulness and piety as being the respective residues of the aristocratic and priestly backgrounds of the intellectual function. The element of play seems to be rooted in the ethos of the leisure class, which has always been central in the history of creative imagination and humanistic learning. The element of piety is reminiscent of the priestly inheritance of the intellectuals: the quest for and the possession of truth was a holy office. As their legatee, the modern intellectual inherits the vulnerability of the aristocrat to the animus of Puritanism and egalitarianism and the vulnerability of the priest to anticlericalism and popular assaults upon hierarchy. We need not be surprised, then, if the intellectual’s position has rarely been comfortable in a country which is, above all others, the home of the democrat and the antinomian.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 32-33

Truth , Home , Imagination , History

“Let us now pose the question again: is recourse to the "human" really enough to preserve and firmly ground the reality of leisure? I intend to show that such recourse to mere Humanism is not enough.
It could be said that the heart of leisure consists in "festival." In festival, or celebration, all three conceptual elements come together as one: the relaxation, the effortlessness, the ascendancy of "being at leisure" […] over mere function.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 50

Question , Reality , Heart

“My image of a President before I came here, and before I had any hope of coming here, was that of a rubber-stamp President, to be frank. This is the image I got. But having come here, I find that the image is not quite correct. I thought, I will have lot of time, leisure for reading, writing, waking etc. But somehow I find I can't get it now. So, my image of a President is of a working President, not an executive President, but a working President, and working within the four corners of the Constitution. It gives very little direct power or influence to him to interfere in matters or affect the course of events, but there is a subtle influence of the office of the President on the executive and the arms of the government and on the public as a whole. It is a position which has to be used with the, what I should say, with a philosophy of indirect approach.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Hope , Time , Reading

“From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.”

E. F. Schumacher book A Guide for the Perplexed

A Guide for the Perplexed

“I want to see all Americans have a reasonable amount of leisure. Then I want to see them educated to use such leisure for their own enjoyment and betterment, and the strengthening of the quality of their citizenship. We can go a long way in that direction by getting them out of doors and really interested in nature. We can make still further progress by engaging them in games and sports. Our country is a land of cultured men and women. It is a land of agriculture, of industries, of schools, and of places of religious worship. It is a land of varied climes and scenery, of mountain and plain, of lake and river. It is the American heritage. We must make it a land of vision, a land of work, of sincere striving for the good, but we must add to all these, in order to round out the full stature of the people, an ample effort to make it a land of wholesome enjoyment and perennial gladness.”

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

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Women , Men , People , Education

“Very busy people always find time for everything.
Conversely, people with immense leisure find time for nothing.”

Ernest Dimnet (1866–1954) French writer

Source: The Art of Thinking (1928), p. 106

People , Business , Time

“Leisure moments: each life well regulated has some such intervals, and he who cannot make way for them does not know how to live.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

Des moments libres. Toute vie bien réglée a les siens, et qui ne sait pas les provoquer ne sait pas vivre.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 43

Life , Way

“We can imagine that the Academy, which could be attended only by men of leisure, was a cradle of discontent. The author of the Laws was a disgruntled old man, full of political rancor, fearing and hating the crowd and above all their demagogues; his prejudices had crystallized and he had become an old doctrinaire, unable to see anything but the reflections of his own personality and to hear anything but the echoes of his own thoughts. The worst of it was that he, a noble Athenian, admired the very Spartans who had defeated and humiliated his fatherland. Plato was witnessing a social revolution (even as we are) and he could not bear it at all. His main concern was: how could one stop it.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Source: A History of Science Vol.1 Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (1952), Ch.16 "Plato and the Academy" p. 409.

Men , Hate , Fear , Law

“The kind of thing which I collect I can always carry back with me to the studio and study at leisure. I am fascinated by the whole problem of the tensions produced by the power of growth.”

Graham Sutherland (1903–1980) English artist

Quoted in Noël Barber, Pierre Jeannerat de Beerski, "Conversations with Painters" (1964), p. 45

Problem , Study

“I don’t like women. I never did. That’s why I don’t belong to women’s lib. Most of my relatives were male. Women are the inferior sex. There’s no doubt about it — women are the inferior sex, in every way. There’s never been any woman genius — never. With all the opportunity in the world — all the leisure in the world, all the shelter — if women had any genius, it would’ve come out. It never did. There’s been no woman Michelangelo, or Beethoven, or Mozart.”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

1970s-, The Captains, the Kings, and Taylor Caldwell (1978)

Women , World , Sex , Way

“I grew up in South Africa, so believe me when I say: Israel is not an apartheid state … The difference between the two countries could scarcely be more stark. Under apartheid, a legal structure of racial hierarchy governed all aspects of life. Black South Africans were denied the vote. They were required by law to live, work, study, travel, enjoy leisure activities, receive medical treatment and even go to the lavatory separately from those with a different colour of skin. Interracial relationships and marriages were illegal. It was subjugation in its rawest form. Contrast that with Israel, a country whose Arab, Druze, Bedouin, Ethiopian, Russian, Baha’i, Armenian and other citizens have equal status under the law. Anyone who truly understands what apartheid was cannot possibly look around Israel today and honestly claim there is any kind of parity.”

Ephraim Mirvis (1956) South African rabbi

New Statesman, 24 February 2016 http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/02/i-grew-south-africa-so-believe-me-when-i-say-israel-not-apartheid-state

Life , Marriage , Law , Travel

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

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: Il Penseroso (1631), Line 49

Pleasure

“Political equality is not merely a folly – it is a chimera. It is idle to discuss whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does. Whatever may be the written text of a Constitution, the multitude always will have leaders among them, and those leaders not selected by themselves. They may set up the pretence of political equality, if they will, and delude themselves with a belief of its existence. But the only consequences will be, that they will have bad leaders instead of good. Every community has natural leaders, to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries by birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government. They have the leisure for the task, and can give it the close attention and the preparatory study which it needs. Fortune enables them to do it for the most part gratuitously, so that the struggles of ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed. They occupy a position of sufficient prominence among their neighbours to feel that their course is closely watched, and they belong to a class brought up apart from temptations to the meaner kinds of crime, and therefore it is no praise to them if, in such matters, their moral code stands high. But even if they be at bottom no better than others who have passed though greater vicissitudes of fortune, they have at least this inestimable advantage – that, when higher motives fail, their virtue has all the support which human respect can give. They are the aristocracy of a country in the original and best sense of the word. Whether a few of them are decorated by honorary titles or enjoy hereditary privileges, is a matter of secondary moment. The important point is, that the rulers of the country should be taken from among them, and that with them should be the political preponderance to which they have every right that superior fitness can confer. Unlimited power would be as ill-bestowed upon them as upon any other set of men. They must be checked by constitutional forms and watched by an active public opinion, lest their rightful pre-eminence should degenerate into the domination of a class. But woe to the community that deposes them altogether!”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 112, 1862, pp. 547-548
1860s

Men , Feeling , Communication , Motivation

“As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Letter to G W Rusden (8 June 1876), published in The Letters of Anthony Trollope (1983), p. 691

Life , Parent

“What, then, shall we do? someone may ask. What else, indeed, than devote ourselves to the care of our souls, keeping all our leisure free from other things. Accordingly, we should not be slaves of the body, except so far as is strictly necessary; but our souls we should supply with all things that are best, through philosophy freeing them, as from a prison, from association with the passions of the body.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 415

Soul , Passion

“"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.”

Edmund Burke book A Vindication of Natural Society

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)

War , Peace , Imagination , Nature

“The history of most fictions would be far stranger than the fictions themselves; but it would be a dark and sad chronicle. Half the works that constitute the charm of our leisure, that give their own interest to the long November evening, or add to the charm of a summer noon beneath the greenwood tree, are the offspring of poverty and of pain. … How often is the writer obliged to put his own trouble, his suffering, or his sorrow aside, to finish the task! The hand may tremble, the eyes fill with unbidden tears, and the temples throb with feverish pain, yet how often is there some hard and harsh necessity, which says, "the work must be done.””

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Pain , Sadness , History , Tear

“So soon as Squire Cass's standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr. Osgood's, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut, pork-pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all its freshness — everything, in fact, that appetites at leisure could desire, in perhaps greater perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at Squire Cass's.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 3 (at page 24)

Perfection

“Failures are often the results of timidity and fears; disappointments are the results of bashfulness; hours of leisure pass away like summer-clouds, therefore, do not waste opportunity of doing good.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Fear , Disappointment , Failure , Summer

“Children […] had sat in those very box buildings under buzzing fluorescent lights listening to their science teachers prattle about the wonders of space travel and gene splicing and how we were all going to live to be a hundred and twenty five years old in "smart" computer-controlled houses where all we had to do was speak to bump up the heat or turn on giant home theater screens in a life of perpetual leisure and comfort. It made me sick to think about. Not because there's something necessarily wrong with leisure or comfort, but because that's where our aspirations ended. And in the face of what had actually happened to us, it seemed obscenely stupid.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 6, p. 33–34

Life , Children , Stupidity , Travel

“The art of thinking is also the art of believing, because no human being at the present stage of civilization could safely call all his individual and social beliefs into question again or submit them to his conscience. To change all one's opinions is a mental diversion which requires leisure for its indulgence. In order to live a life of action, man must accept most of the moral, social, and religious laws which have been recognized as necessary by his predecessors.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Thinking

Life , Law , Art , Question

“We must remember that machines do not, as in the capitalist system, compete with workers or enslave workers. Workers must view machines as the liberators of their force. Machines are placed at the service of workers as soon as the exploitation of man by man stops. And that is what we are striving for: we are trying to turn machines into liberating instruments of peasants, so they will have more time for leisure, so they will have more time to study, to develop in every sense, to achieve the most important thing we must achieve: individuals developed to the full, this is the aim we are all struggling for.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech at the National Sugar Plenary Meeting in Camagüey, February 9, 1963 Ernesto Che Guevera. Escritos y discursos. Op. cit., vol. 7.
On Automation (1963)

Sense , Study , Time

“Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

In 1981, in reference to an economic recession, as quoted in "Long line of princely gaffes", BBC News (1 March 2002)
1980s

“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.”

L. P. Jacks (1860–1955) British educator, philosopher, and Unitarian minister

Misattributed to Chateaubriand on the internet and even some recently published books, this statement actually originated with L. P. Jacks in Education through Recreation (1932)
Misattributed

Education , Art , Appearance , Drawing

“Our rulers (both here and in Great Britain) will now have leisure to attend to every part of our American polity; and, among other things, to the state of Indians: … they have been looked upon as untamed and untameable monsters; whom, like the devoted nations around Judea, it was a kind of religion with white men to exterminate. We have treated them with a rigour and severity equally unsuitable to the genius of our government, and the mild spirit of our religion.”

Jonathan Boucher (1738–1804) English minister

[In later footnotes, Boucher notes that by "white men" the native Americans mean the English; they call the French and Spanish by their proper names. He also gives examples of atrocities committed by colonists against native Americans, and expresses sarcastic surprise that "all such circumstances have failed to attract the attention of the writers of American history"].
"A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution" (London, Robinson, 1797)

Men , Religion , Parting

“He that always waits upon God is ready whenever He calls. Neglect not to set your accounts even; he is a happy man who to lives as that death at all times may find him at leisure to die.”

Owen Feltham (1602–1668) English writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 180.

Death , God , Time , Waiting

“Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into form.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Art , Science , Perfection

“It is not a snobbish rich-man's college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want—or what they are told they want—is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch 2

Women , Men , People , Books

“We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much nonproductive activity is required to accompany productive activity. The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition. Free software will greatly reduce these drains in the area of software production. We must do this, in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work for us.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

“Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity, first of all, there is leisure as "non-activity" — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.
Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. […] Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 31

Understanding , Reality , Personality

“Time found our tired love sleeping,
And kissed away his breath;
But what should we do weeping,
Though light love sleep to death?
We have drained his lips at leisure,
Till there's not left to drain
A single sob of pleasure,
A single pulse of pain.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne book Poems and Ballads

"Rococo", lines 17-24.
Poems and Ballads (1866-89)

Love , Death , Pain , Pleasure

“Recently in our country, there has been a steadily increasing number of people who dislike work and pursue leisure and extravagance. Almost everywhere individuals and organizations are fighting with resultant loss of energy that is needed for positive action. In order to save them from this situation, a principle of judo, based on the maximum efficiency concept should be applied as one aspect of modern society and as a natural result of the application of the principle of maximum efficiency, a mutual welfare and prosperity is believed to be the only effective way to ease and neutralize the forces among these individuals and organizations.”

Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938) Japanese educator and judoka

Also quoted in "Hints For Judo" by D. Risei Kano, at usadojo.com http://www.usadojo.com/articles/hints-judo.htm
Kodokan Magazine (1974)

People , Way , Nature , Loss

“Mathieu Golovinski was born in the Simbirsk region of Russia in 1865 during the reign of the Romanov dynasty. His family, a part of the fading Russian aristocracy, provided him with a fragile social standing. He grew up in a leisured environment typical of families of that class.
His father, Basil Golobinski, died, however, when Mathieu was 10 years old.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.31

Family , Parting

“I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life—many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Source: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), p. 27

Life , Men , Money , Justice

“Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Why Distant Objects Please"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Knowledge , Sense , Distant , Passion

“The two conditions that lead others to languor – i. e. leisure and solitude – him made sharper.”
Ita duae res, quae languorem afferunt ceteris, illum acuebant; otium et solitudo.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book III, section 1
De Officiis – On Duties (44 BC)

Solitude

“The Bible is the treasure of the poor, the solace of the sick, and the support of the dying; and while other books may amuse and instruct in a leisure hour, it is the peculiar triumph of that book to create light in the midst of darkness, to alleviate the sorrow which admits of no other alleviation, to direct a beam of hope to the heart which no other topic of consolation can reach; while guilt, despair, and death vanish at the touch of its holy inspiration.”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 30.

Death , Books , Hope , Support

“People want more and more leisure time which means the freedom to do what they want to do, not what they have to do, and as we get richer and richer, more and more people will be able to afford that.”

Robert Fogel (1926–2013) American economist, historian

Robert Fogel in: " Early Retirees Turn to Volunteer Work http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4970476," at npr.org. October 23, 2005.

People , Freedom , Time

“You are told that education, that enlightenment, that leisure, that high station, that political experience are arrayed in the opposing camp, and I am sorry to say that to a large extent I cannot deny it. But though I cannot deny it, I painfully reflect that in almost every one, if not in every one, of the great political controversies of the last 50 years, whether they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery, or whatever subject they touched, these leisured classes, these educated classes, these wealthy classes, these titled classes, have been in the wrong.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Edinburgh (30 June 1892), quoted in The Times (1 July 1892), p. 12.
1890s

Education , Religion

“I know that the Crusaders of Majorca put to death, in a single night, all the prisoners who were huddled in the Catalonian trenches. They took the whole herd down to the shore and shot them, one beast at a time - they were quite leisurely about it. The Lord High Archbishop of Palma arranged to be represented at the ceremony, by a certain number of his priests. You can picture the scene can't you? 'Come on, father, isn't that one ready?' - 'Just a moment captain, I'm handing him over to you at once.' When the job was finished, the Crusaders piled their cattle in two heaps - those who'd been given absolution and those who hadn't- then sprinkled petrol over them. It is quite likely that this purification by fire may then have taken on, by reason of the presence of priests officiating a liturgical significance. Unfortunately I only saw these blackened, shiny creatures two days after that, contorted by the flames, some of them counterfeiting obscene poses in death, which must have been very distressing for the ladies of Palma and for their eminent confessors. A reeking tar oozed out of them…”

Georges Bernanos book Les grands cimetières sous la lune

Source: Les grands cimetieres sous la lune (A Diary of My Times) 1938, p.153-154

Death , Time , Night

“The famous Lord Hallifax (though so much talked of) was rather a pretender to taste, than really possessed of it.—When I had finished the two or three first books of my translation of the Iliad, that lord, "desired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house." Addison, Congreve, and Garth, were there at the reading.—In four or five places, Lord Hallifax stopped me very civilly; and with a speech, each time of much the same kind: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me.—Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little at your leisure.—I am sure you can give it a little turn."—I returned from Lord Hallifax's with Dr. Garth, in his chariot; and as we were going along, was saying to the doctor, that my lord had laid me under a good deal of difficulty, by such loose and general observations; that I had been thinking over the passages almost ever since, and could not guess at what it was that offended his lordship in either of them.—Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Hallifax, to know his way yet: that I need not puzzle myself in looking those places over and over when I got home. "All you need do, (said he) is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Hallifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages; and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event."—I followed his advice; waited on Lord Hallifax some time after: said, I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed[; ] read them to him exactly as they were at first; and his lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, "Ay now, Mr. Pope, they are perfectly right! nothing can be better."”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

As quoted in Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) by Joseph Spence [published from the original papers; with notes, and a life of the author, by Samuel Weller Singer]; "Spence's Anecdotes", Section IV. pp. 134–136.
Attributed

Pleasure , Books , Hope , Way

“The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.”

William Hazlitt book The Spirit of the Age

"Mr. Brougham — Sir F. Burdett" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_the_Age/Mr._Brougham-Sir_F._Burdett
The Spirit of the Age (1825)

Business

“Barelvi’s confidence in a jihad against the British collapsed when he surveyed the extent and the magnitude of British power in India. He did the next best under the circumstances, and declared a jihad against the Sikh power in the Punjab, Kashmir and the North-West Frontier. The British on their part welcomed this change and permitted Barelvi to travel towards the border of Afghanistan at a leisurely pace, collecting money and manpower along the way. It was during this journey that Barelvi stayed with or met several Hindu princes, feigned that his fulminations against the Sikhs were a fake, and that he was going out of India in order to establish a base for fighting against the British. It is surmised that some Hindu princes took him at his word, and gave him financial help. To the Muslim princes, however, he told the truth, namely, that he was up against the Sikhs because they “do not allow the call to prayer from mosques and the killing of cows.”
Barelvi set up his base in the North-West Frontier near Afghanistan. The active assistance he expected from the Afghan king did not materialise because that country was in a mess at that time. But the British connived at the constant flow not only of a sizable manpower but also of a lot of finance. Muslim magnates in India were helping him to the hilt. His basic strategy was to conquer Kashmir before launching his major offensive against the Punjab. But he met with very little success in that direction in spite of several attempts. Finally, he met his Waterloo in 1831 when the Sikhs under Kunwar Sher Singh stormed his citadel at Balakot. The great mujahid fell in the very first battle he ever fought. His corpse along with that of his second in command was burnt, and the ashes were scattered in the winds. Muslims hail him as a shahid.”

Syed Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831) Muslim activist

Goel, S. R. (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences.

Money , Truth , Way , Travel

“Liberal education was aristocratic in the sense that it was the education of those who enjoyed leisure and political power. If it was the right education for those who had leisure and political power, then it is the right education for everybody today.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Education , Sense

“Tarzan was an interested spectator. His desire to kill burned fiercely in his wild breast, but his desire to learn was even greater. He would follow this savage creature for a while and know from whence he came. He could kill him at his leisure later, when the bow and deadly arrows were laid aside.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 9 : Man and Man

Learning

“It is long since I have known the sweets of leisure and repose; since I have known in fine, that indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing, and being nothing.”
Olim nescio quid sit otium quid quies, quid denique illud iners quidem, iucundum tamen nihil agere nihil esse.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 9, 1.
Letters, Book VIII

“Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of Society is not natural to mankind. It cuts against the grain. A boy would like to follow his father in pursuit of food or prey. He would like to be doing serviceable things so far as his utmost strength allowed. He would like to be earning wages however small to help to keep up the home. He would like to have some leisure of his own to use or misuse as he pleased. He would ask little more than the right to work or starve. And then perhaps in the evenings a real love of learning would come to those who are worthy — and why try to stuff in those who are not?”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

and knowledge and thought would open the ‘magic casements’ of the mind.
Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 3 (Examinations).

Love , Education , Food , Home

“May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Architecture of Theories (1891)

World , Future

“The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age (1825)
Misattributed

Business

“I know of the boons that machinery has conferred on men, all tyrants have boons to confer, but service to the dynasty of steam and steel is a hard service and gives little leisure to fancy to flit from field to field.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

Romance of Modern Stage; National Review of London; 1911

Men

“The cultural-revolutionary politics of personal relations may be far more firmly established in the domains of domesticity, leisure, and consumption than in the organization of practical life. It may still flourish more strongly among the educated professional classes than among ordinary working people. Its war against the tyranny of roles and hierarchies may be perverted by a lack of institutional imagination. Yet its achievements are real. We cannot understand them merely as a series of episides in the confined life of high culture. We can often trace the ideas of this cultural-revolutionary politics of role-jumbling to the work of small numbers of thinkers, artists, and professional outsiders. But the diffusion of these ideas through the medium of popular culture, and the sympathy with which they have been greeted by ever larger sectors of the population, would have been inconceivable without a prior transformation of social life. As always, people had to see enacted before their eyes a fragmentary example of the connection between the freedom to revise social arrangements and assumptions and freedom from dependence and depersonalization. Only then could they want more of the same and believe more possible.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), pp. 293-294

Life , War , People , Education

“As a child, I devoted much of my leisure to drawing sketches of relatives and friends, familiar sights and scenes, a view that suddenly moved me or appealed to me. I always concentrated on depicting nature as I saw or felt it, in terms of lines, and obtaining a kind of psychological likeness which would convey the personality of my model or the mood of the moment.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 114

Mood , Nature , Drawing , Personality

“In the effort to regain a space of true leisure, to bring about a fundamentally correct attitude and "exercise" of leisure, the real difficulty of this so-often despaired-of project consists in the fact that the ultimate root of leisure lies outside the range of our responsible, voluntary action. The fullest harmony with the world, to be precise, cannot come about on the basis of a voluntary decision. Above all, one cannot simply "make" it happen for some ulterior purpose. There are certain things which one cannot do "in order to …"”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

do something else.
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 58

World , Exercises , Decision , Effort

“What is scarce is money. The lack of money to spend on goods is what keeps the unemployed resources from producing more goods. Work, moreover, instead of being a curse, is desired more than anything else because the alternative is not enjoyment of leisure but the suffering of unemployment and deprivation. Of course, if people could get income without they would not object too much (although their self-respect in feeling they are useful members in society who are earning their income is too easily underestimated). But it is only by finding work they can obtain the necessary income they need.”

Abba Lerner (1903–1982) American economist

On the causes of unemployment (1951, pg.147-48) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=174849

Money , People , Feeling , Suffering

“Correctly anticipating the rapid growth of living standards, moreover, Keynes predicted that within a century people's material wants would be satiated, and so per capita consumption would stop growing. People would work less, but only because their need for income, and more important their desire for it, was less. And then the challenge to society would be the management of unprecedented voluntary leisure. This was a popular 1930s theme--think of Huxley's Brave New World--but it underestimated the ability of business to create new wants, and new goods and services to fulfill them.”

Richard A. Posner (1939) United States federal judge

How I Became a Keynesian (2009)

People , World , Business , Thinking

“True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Letter to Catherine G. Lansing (5 September 1877), published in The Melville Log : A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (1951) by Jay Leyda, Vol. 2, p. 765
Context: Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.

“Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.”

Isocrates (-436–-338 BC) ancient greek rhetorician

Verse 18.
To Demonicus
Context: If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, preserve by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge; for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one's friends and not accept it. Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.

Way , Learning , Time

“But the academic is brought closer to lower-class culture because of his very distance from it. Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
Context: Courses were offered in such fields as nineteenth-century black history and Hispanic-American folk art. The activists made a peculiar claim for these classes. They insisted that the courses would alleviate the cultural anxiety of nonwhite students by permitting them to stay in touch with their home culture. The perspective gained in the classroom or the library does indeed permit an academic to draw nearer to and understand better the culture of the alien poor. But the academic is brought closer to lower-class culture because of his very distance from it. Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly.

Imagination

“The more simple the society, the more leisured its way of life.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968), p. 29

Life , Way

“God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.”

Seamus Heaney book Death of a Naturalist

"Docker", line 10, from Death of a Naturalist.
Poetry Quotes, Death of a Naturalist

Life , God

“He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.”

Ivan Illich book Energy and Equity

"Energy and Equity" (1974).
Context: The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man's feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.
The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To "gather" for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportation and communications systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.

People , Faith , Freedom

“Why do we think that arts are leisure? Why isn't it arts and science or arts and the most important thing in your life?”

Julie Taymor (1952) American film and theatre director

Bill Moyers interview (2002)
Context: I used to say that arts were talked about in the arts and leisure page. Now, why would it be arts and leisure? Why do we think that arts are leisure? Why isn't it arts and science or arts and the most important thing in your life? I think that art has become a big scarlet letter in our culture.
It's a big "A." And it says, you are an elitist, you're effete, or whatever those things... do you know what I mean? It means you don't connect. And I don't believe that. I think we've patronized our audiences long enough.
You can do things that would bring people to another place and still get someone on a very daily mundane moving level but you don't have to separate art from the masses.

Life , Art , Thinking , Science

“Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

The Cultivation of Conspiracy (1998)
Context: Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship. Therefore, I have tried to identify the climate that fosters and the "conditioned" air that hinders the growth of friendship.

Friendship , Truth , Flowers , Knowledge

“Who shall call me ungentle, unfair,
I long'd so heartily then and there
To give him the grasp of fellowship;
But while I past he was humming an air,
Stopt, and then with a riding whip,
Leisurely tapping a glossy boot,
And curving a contumelious lip,
Gorgonised me from head to foot
With a stony British stare.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

Part I, section xiii, stanza 2
Maud; A Monodrama (1855)

Past

“I resolved to devote my leisure moments to the investigation of the "Organic remains of a former world"”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

The Fossils of the South Downs; or Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex (1822)
Context: Upon fixing my residence at Lewes, I resolved to devote my leisure moments to the investigation of the "Organic remains of a former world"...

World

“I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

As quoted in in Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920 (1922) by Carl Clinton Van Doren
Context: I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful — being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.

Life , Pleasure , Secret , Reading

“It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. I do not mean that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power.”

Henry George book Progress and Poverty

Introductory : The Problem
Progress and Poverty (1879)
Context: It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. I do not mean that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is still further to depress the condition of the lowest class. The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.

Wealth

“No president who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure.”

James K. Polk (1795–1849) American politician, 11th President of the United States (in office from 1845 to 1849)

Diary entry (29 December 1848).
Context: No president who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure. If he entrusts the details and smaller matters to subordinates constant errors will occur. I prefer to supervise the whole operations of the government myself rather than entrust the public business to subordinates, and this makes my duties very great.

“By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

Myth of Megalopolis 
The City in History (1961)
Context: Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.

Fashion , Wealth

“If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure”

J. G. Ballard book Super-Cannes

"Dr. Wilder Penrose"
Super-Cannes (2000)
Context: 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.

People

“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.”

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) French writer, politician, diplomat and historian

Misattributed to Chateaubriand on the internet and even some recently published books, this statement actually originated with L. P. Jacks in Education through Recreation (1932)
Misattributed
Context: 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.

Education , Art , Drawing

“Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Letter to Catherine G. Lansing (5 September 1877), published in The Melville Log : A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (1951) by Jay Leyda, Vol. 2, p. 765
Context: Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.

“Scarcely any specialist of to-day is really master of all the work which has been done in his own comparatively small field. Facts and their classification have been accumulating at such a rate that nobody seems to have leisure to recognise the relations of sub-groups to the whole. It is as if individual workers... were bringing their stones to one great building and piling them on and cementing them... without regard to any general plan... only where some one has placed a great corner stone... the building... rises... more rapidly... till it... is stopped for want of side support. Yet this great structure... possesses a symmetry and unity... in scientific method. The smallest group of facts, if properly classified and logically dealt with, ...has its proper place... wholly independent of the individual workman who... shaped it. Even when two men work unwittingly at the same stone they will but modify and correct each other... In the face of all this enormous progress... when in all civilised lands men are applying the scientific method... the goal of science is and must be infinitely distant.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

Support , Distant , Relation ships , Science

“I think that there has been clearly expounded the mind of arithmeticians, who, by means of numbers and of names, suppose that they interpret life. Now I perceive that these, enjoying leisure, and being trained in calculation, have been desirous that, through the art delivered to them from childhood, they, acquiring celebrity, should be styled prophets.”

Hippolytus of Rome Refutation of all Heresies

Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Volume 6: Hippolytus, Bishop Of Rome, Volume 1 P. 86
Refutation of All Heresies

Childhood , Art , Thinking , Training

“What people do with their leisure tells us a great deal about the nature of a society, what its values really are, for example, as opposed to what its members say its values are.”

Jack McDevitt book Infinity Beach

Source: Infinity Beach (2000), Chapter 32 (p. 476)

People , Nature

“The people most affected by this are people of the middle class who, lacking the hard contact with realities of the masses and unable to attain to the freedoms of a leisured class, are more than all types of people given to trivial divisions and subdivisions of social rank and precedence.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 52

Reality , People , Freedom

“The various branches of geometry are all interrelated closely and quite often unexpectedly. This shows up in many places in the book. Even so... it was necessary to make each chapter...self-contained... We hope that... we have rendered each chapter taken by itself... understandable and interesting. We want to take the reader on a leisurely walk... in the big garden that is geometry, so that each may pick for himself a bouquet to his liking.”

David Hilbert Geometry and the Imagination

Preface
Geometry and the Imagination (1952)

Understanding , Hope , Self-confidence , Books

“Now let us see what he can do with it. Let us see if, under easier conditions, he is able to build the planetary paradise he has always desired, or will abuse his new leisure to the destruction of his soul. Let us see if godly power will make him a little more godlike.”

Desmond Leslie (1921–2001) British pilot, film maker, writer, and musician

Source: The Amazing Mr. Lutterworth (1958), p. 201

Soul , Making love

“Complacency results from separation — the sense that we are separate and that by competition we become superior — and that superiority allows us to live what we call ‘well’. But we cannot live ‘well’ when two-thirds of the world are living and dying in absolute poverty. It is not possible to do so with impunity, and we do not. The result is crime. The result is catastrophe of one kind or another — governments which create wars for oil, for example. That is a catastrophe, and it is only possible because we are complacent, because we do not acknowledge the needs of millions of people who cannot take for granted what we take for granted: regular food, leisure, education and healthcare.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The World Teacher for All Humanity (2007)

Food , War , People , World

“What fixes and preserves a nation’s language, as well as its sciences and its history, is simply the strength of its political power, accompanied by the happy welfare and leisure of its inhabitants.”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

M. Asin in Al-Andalus; 1939; vol IV; p. 278.

Science , Happiness , History

“Yes, star-crossed in pleasure, the stream flows on by
Yes, as we're sated in leisure, we watch it fly, yes
And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me...
Hours are like diamonds, don't let them waste...
Drink in your summer, gather your corn...
The dreams of the nighttime will vanish by dawn”

Mick Jagger (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

Time Waits for No One (co-written with Keith Richards) on the Rolling Stones' 1974 album It's Only Rock 'n Roll (1973).
Lyrics

Drink , Waiting , Time , Star

“The coming stock market crash will inevitably cause much unemployment. This will lead to a complete change of government priorities: the supplying of adequate food, shelter, health-care and education will become paramount responsibilities of all forward looking nations. The waste of resources as today, in armaments and competitive practices, will cease. A rational and sustainable economic structure based on sufficiency will become the norm. Leisure will be the natural by-product of such a structure. p.156”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: Maitreya's Mission Vol. II (1993), After the stock markets collapse

Food , Health , Nature , Education

“In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing. Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing.”

William Gibson book Distrust That Particular Flavor

"The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)

Fish , Drink , Age , Tea

“Law and order are the privilege of the poor. So far as they affect the rich they are the restraint of the rich. It is for all those who are interested in the industry and commerce of this country, not for those who are interested merely in fixed capital and the leisurely enjoyment of its fruits, to struggle to maintain the idea of the supremacy of the law.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech to the Conference of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations in Oxford (23 November 1887), quoted in The Times (24 November 1887), p. 7
1880s

Idea , Law , Country

“It was at this time that the suggestion of studying medicine was first presented to me, by a lady friend. This friend finally died of a painful disease, the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her. She once said to me,'You are fond of study, have health and leisure; why not study medicine? If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me.'”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

But I at once repudiated the suggestion as an impossible one, saying that I hated everything connected with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book.
... My favourite studies were history and metaphysics, and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust.
pp. 27–28 https://books.google.com/books?id=GHkIAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA27
Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895)

Pain , Study , Time , Disease