Leisure And Work Quotes & Sayings

The simple idea that everyone needs a reasonable amount of challenging work in his or her life, and also a personal life, complete with noncompetitive leisure, has never really taken hold. — Judith Martin

Love can't flourish in a "society" based on money and meaningless work, but rather requires complete economic, as well as personal, freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship, but which our "society" provides practically no opportunity to engage in. — Valerie Solanas

Work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure. — E.F. Schumacher

You were intended not only to work, but to rest, laugh, play, and have proper leisure and enjoyment. To develop an all-around personality you must have interest outside of your regular vocation that will serve to balance your business responsibilities. — Grenville Kleiser

Our leisure is the time the Devil seizes upon to make us work for him; and the only way we can avoid conscription into his ranks is to keep all our leisure moments profitably employed. — James Ellis

As work weeks get longer and leisure time shrinks, people are becoming sicker, more distracted, absent, unproductive, and less innovative. — Brigid Schulte

The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. — Byung-Chul Han

Many people know how to work hard; many others know how to play well; but the rarest talent in the world is the ability to introduce elements of playfulness into work, and to put some constructive labor into our leisure. — Sydney J. Harris

Citing both the Buddha and Aristotle, Sachs makes the case for a "middle path," a path of moderation and balance between work and non-work (what he calls, quaintly in this day and age, "leisure"), savings and consumption, self-interest and compassion, individualism and citizenship. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

How can one explain this trend towards a more colorless and shallow life? Well, the work was easier, if less healthy, and it brought in more money, more leisure, and perhaps more entertainment. A day in the country is long and hard. And yet the fruits of their present life were worthless compared to a single coin of their former life: a rest in the evening and a rural festivity. That they no longer knew the old kind of happiness was obvious from the discontentment which spread over their features. Soon dissatisfaction, prevailing over all their other moods, became their religion. — Ernst Junger

Leisure is non-work for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. — Bob Black

Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. Like that huge historic turning point, the revolution in marriage has transformed how people organize their work and interpersonal commitments, use their leisure time, understand their sexuality, and take care of children and the elderly. It has liberated some people from restrictive, inherited roles in society. But it has stripped others of traditional support systems and rules of behavior without establishing new ones. — Stephanie Coontz

Man is still by instinct a predatory animal given to devilish aggression. The discoveries of science have immensely increased productivity of material things. They have increased the standards of living and comfort. They have eliminated infinite drudgery. They have increased leisure. But that gives more time for devilment. The work of science has eliminated much disease and suffering. It has increased the length of life. That, together with increase in productivity, has resulted in vastly increased populations. Also it increased the number of people engaged in devilment. — Herbert Hoover

Einstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted. — Havelock Ellis

The closest thing we have to the traditional ideology of the leisure class is a group of artists and intellectuals who regard their work as play and their play as work. — David Riesman

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life's leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. — Thomas Merton

My father taught me to work, but not to love it. I never did like to work, and I don't deny it. I'd rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh
anything but work. — Abraham Lincoln

A Society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility. — Lewis Mumford

Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we're all in it together. It'll work when there's a shared sense of destiny. It can be done! — Jerry Brown

I ask for a moment's indulgence to sit by thy side. The works
that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.
Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.
Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and
the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.
A Moments Indulgence
Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing
dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure. — Rabindranath Tagore

One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. 'One-size-fits-all,' and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is 'slavery.' — David Mamet

In Aristotle ... leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work ... leisure is pursued solely for its own sake ... : the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ... gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate good is otium - the opposite is negotium, or gainful work.
We have sought too much counsel in the proto-Calvinist work ethic preached by St Paul ... during the cessation of work we nurture family, educate, nourish friendships ... in loafing, most of our innovations come ... the routine of daily work has too often served as ... sleep ... a refuge from two crucial states - awakedness to the needs of others, and to the transcendent, which only comes ... loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

We therefore work, not
for the work's sake, but for money - and money is supposed to get us
what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United
States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched
and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle andupper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as
princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money
alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art
and a skill for which we have little talent or energy. — Alan W. Watts

I want people to understand the amazing, positive way our software can make leisure time more enjoyable, and work and businesses more successful. — Steve Ballmer

I have never sought to displease; I merely seek pleasure and avoid the pain it causes those who work to produce it. That is what it means to live by the leisure principle. — Bauvard

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both. — James A. Michener

The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human. — Alain De Botton

Work is not all there is to life. You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life. If you make any work the purpose of your life - even if that work is church ministry - you create an idol that rivals God. Your relationship with God is the most important foundation for your life, and indeed it keeps all the other factors - work, friendships and family, leisure and pleasure - from becoming so important to you that they become addicting and distorted. — Timothy J. Keller

We should abolish 'work.' By that I mean abolishing the distinction between work and leisure, one of the greatest mistakes of the last century, one that enables employers to keep workers in lousy jobs by granting them some leisure time. — Theodore Zeldin

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything that we enjoy is a result of someone's hard work. Some work is visible and other work goes unseen, but both are equally important. Some people stop working as soon as they find a job. Regardless of the unemployment statistics, it is hard to find good people to work. Many people don't understand the difference between idle time and leisure time. Idle time amounts to wasting or stealing time; leisure time is earned. Procrastinating amounts to not working.
Excellence is not luck; it is the result of a lot of hard work and practice. Hard work and practice make a person better at whatever he is doing. — Shiv Khera

We relied on the slave labor of African peoples to build the levees that protected our homes and farmland, to harvest and cook our food, to care for our children, to chop, and hoe, and sweat, and sew, and nurse us back to health, while we aspired to be persons of leisure, or at least to leave the really brutal work to them. — Tim Wise

Possibly the best suggestion in condensed form, as to how to live, was given by my old Headmaster, Dr. Haig Brown, in 1904, when he wrote his Recipe for Old Age. A diet moderate and spare, Freedom from base financial care, Abundant work and little leisure, A love of duty more than pleasure, An even and contented mind In charity with all mankind, Some thoughts too sacred for display In the broad light of common day, A peaceful home, a loving wife, Children, who are a crown of life; These lengthen out the years of man Beyond the Psalmist's narrow span. — Robert Baden-Powell

The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer — Thomas Merton

Our hankering for a state of leisure or leisure state is the proof of the fact that most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work, and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss.
"Why Exhibit Works of Art? — Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

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

We often pity the poor, because they have no leisure to mourn their departed relatives, and necessity obliges them to labor through their severest afflictions: but is not active employment the best remedy for overwhelming sorrow
the surest antidote for despair? It may be a rough comforter: it may seem hard to be harassed with the cares of life when we have no relish for its enjoyments; to be goaded to labor when the heart is ready to break, and the vexed spirit implores for rest only to weep in silence: but is not labor better than the rest we covet? and are not those petty, tormenting cares less hurtful than a continual brooding over the great affliction that oppresses us? Besides, we cannot have cares, and anxieties, and toil, without hope
if it be but the hope of fulfilling our joyless task, accomplishing some needful project, or escaping some further annoyance. — Anne Bronte

We should be able to bring the practice of meditation hall into our daily lives. We need to discuss among ourselves how to do it. Do you practice breathing between phone calls? Do you practice smiling while cutting carrots? Do you practice relaxation after hard hours of work? These are practical questions. If you know how to apply meditation to dinner time, leisure time, sleeping time, it will penetrate your daily life, and it will also have a tremendous effect on social concerns. — Nhat Hanh

But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life. — Olaf Stapledon

I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun. — Jared Diamond

Live theatre provides a rush you can't get in film or television. But it is the TV and film work that offers the leisure to go off and do a play. — Raymond Cruz

The truly efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. — Henry David Thoreau

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness. — Henry Ford

How to avoid the danger of polarizing life into work that is meaningless because it is unfree, and leisure that is meaningless because it has no purpose? — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I'd heard once in school that if a single bird were to transport all the sand, grain by grain, from the eastern seabord to the west coast of Africa, it would take ... I didn't catch the number of years, preferring to concentrate on the single bird chosen to perform this thankless task. It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work. Birds search for grubs and build their nests, but their leisure time is theirs to spend as they see fit. I pictured this bird looking down from the branches to say, "You want me to do what?" before flying off, laughing at the at the foolish story he now had to tell his friends. — David Sedaris

The sooner the world solves its economic problems, the sooner its inhabitants can afford leisure and peace and get on with the non-material things that are inherently important: the work of mind and spirit that is gloriously and uniquely human, the work that no machine can ever do. — Louis O. Kelso

Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanisation, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labour necessary in the manufacture of any product. We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us. — The Invisible Committee

The requirements of life still dictate that we spend our time in a way that is not that different from the African baboons. Give and take a few hours, most people sleep one-third of the day, and use the remainder to work, travel, and rest in more or less the same proportions as the baboons do. And as the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has shown, in thirteenth century French villages-which were among the most advanced in the world at the time-the most common leisure pursuit was still that of picking lice out of each other's hair. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for - business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business. — Henry David Thoreau

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman. — George Bernard Shaw

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever. — Wendell Berry

I sort of leave the character at the end of the day. I don't carry anything around with me - no excess baggage or unnecessary thoughts. I think it's too exhausting to do that. To put things into perspective - your work is your work, and your leisure time is something else. — Sean Bean

I could do whatever I liked to do during the day. I didn't have to work in an office. I could work at home. I could work at my leisure. I worked 'til four in the morning. I worked with the TV and radio on - it was a great setup. I was a night person and still am. — Jack Kirby

Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without its being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant. — Russell L. Ackoff

One should connect language learning with either work or leisure. And not at the expense of them but to supplement them. — Kato Lomb

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. — Yvon Chouinard

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

The fight against unfair scheduling is like the fight for a regulated work day - it's people fighting for reasonable conditions at work and to have a life, so you can have some leisure. — Rachel Holmes

Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. They were poor because these overworked people soon wore out
they became less and less valuable as workers. Therefore, they earned less and less and could buy less and less. — Henry Ford

Nature herself, as has been often said, requires that we should be able, not only to work well, but to use leisure well; for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end. — Aristotle.

Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization - against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call freedom. — Michael Pollan

The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers' society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment ... To believe that such a society will become more "cultured" as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers' society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches. — Hannah Arendt

Most Web activities do not generate jobs and revenue at the rate of past technological breakthroughs. When Ford and General Motors were growing in the early part of the twentieth century, they created millions of jobs and helped build Detroit into a top-tier U.S. city. Today, Facebook creates a lot of voyeuristic pleasure, but the company doesn't employ many people and hasn't done much for Palo Alto; a lot of the "work" is performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers. You could say that the real work is done by its users, in their spare time and as a form of leisure. Web 2.0 is not filling government coffers or supporting many families, even though it's been great for users, programmers, and some information technology specialists. Everyone on the Web has heard of Twitter, but as of Fall 2010, only about three hundred people work there. — Tyler Cowen

Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,
work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. — Henry David Thoreau

Lenin's Personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly. — Orlando Figes

Work is so foundational to our makeup that it is one of the few things we can take in significant doses without harm. Indeed, the Bible does not say we should work one day and rest six or that work and rest should be balanced evenly but directs us to the opposite ratio. Leisure and pleasure are great goods, but we can take only so much of them. — Timothy Keller

If the soul has food for study and learning, nothing is more delightful than an old age of leisure. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed? How can I regain even for a minute the feeling of ample leisure I had during my early, my creative years? Then I seldom felt fussed, or hurried. There was time for work, for play, for love, the confidence that if a task was not done at the appointed time, I easily could fit it into another hour. I used to take leisure for granted, as I did time itself. — Bernard Berenson

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

Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week ... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure. — Julian Huxley

Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it. — Howard Zinn

Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon. — Jeremy Collier

The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want to live and you want to prosper, you've got to be ambitious. You've got to be ready to sacrifice leisure and pleasure, and you've got to plan ahead. I was forty years old before I had any money at all. But these things don't happen overnight. Now, how many people are there who will wait that long to be successful, and work all the time? Not very many. Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm a bloody fool. But I don't think I am. — Roy Thomson

Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor. The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved. — Clement Greenberg

To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call "freedom." Cooking — Michael Pollan

The aspirations of most people
security, pleasure, leisure, meaningful work, creative and intellectual pursuits
are to be supported. These desires and dreams are not shameful. In supporting them, we are showing solidarity with working people, for whom these are luxuries and not givens. — Irena Klepfisz

Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the secret of fulfillment is to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become. — Winifred Gallagher

Taking photographs is not something that happens only in a moment I press the button. It is a full-time occupation. For me there is difference between leisure and work. — Edouard Boubat

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool? — Jonathan Franzen

Progress starts with envisioning a new (yet old) lifestyle with the home as central to all aspects of life-work and leisure, food and energy. So, real progress means bringing the economy, beginning with the food economy, home again. — Jules Dervaes

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other. — Wendell Berry

The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And — Bertrand Russell

The real dividing line between things we call work and the things we call leisure is that in leisure, however active we may be, we make our own choices and our own decisions. We feel for the time being that our life is our own. — Raymond Williams

To encounter Christ is to touch reality and experience transcendence. He gives us a sense of self-worth or personal significance, because He assures us of God's love for us. He sets us free from guilt because He died for us and from paralyzing fear because He reigns. He gives meaning to marriage and home, work and leisure, personhood and citizenship. — John Stott

The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire ... One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure. — Josef Pieper

If a man has important work, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam. — R. H. Tawney

Coca-Cola remains emblematic of the best and worst of America and Western civilization. The history of Coca-Cola is the often funny story of a group of men obsessed with putting a trivial soft drink "within an arm's reach of desire." But at the same time, it is a microcosm of American history. Coca-Cola grew up with the country, shaping and shaped by the times. The drink not only helped to alter consumption patterns, but attitudes toward leisure, work, advertising, sex, family life, and patriotism. — Mark Pendergrast

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

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure. — Seamus Heaney

It should be the privilege of every worker to take advantage of all the improved methods of working that relieve him from the tedium and fatigue of purely mechanical toil, for by this means he gains leisure for the thought necessary to working out his designs, and for the finer touches that the hand alone can give. So long as he remains master of his machinery it will serve him well, and his power of artistic expression will be freed rather than stifled by turning over to it work it is meant to do. — Gustav Stickley

True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked. — Herman Melville

The artist labors while he may, But finds at best too brief the day; And, tho' his works outlast the time And nation that they make sublime, He feels and sees that Nature knows Nothing of time in what she does, But has a leisure infinite Wherein to do her work aright. — Henry Abbey

An argument ensued about abundance, leisure, work, nature, and what a second girl kept calling 'the American way.' When I asked her what she meant by 'the American way,' she said, 'Basically the destruction of everything
the world, your happiness, your soul, everything. The complete package. Evil and war. That's who we are, Mr. Countryman.' — David Guterson

Mindfulness of self: personal moderation to escape mass consumerism Mindfulness of work: the balancing of work and leisure Mindfulness of knowledge: the cultivation of education Mindfulness of others: the exercise of compassion and cooperation Mindfulness of nature: the conservation of the world's ecosystems Mindfulness of the future: the responsibility to save for the future Mindfulness of politics: the cultivation of public deliberation and shared values for collective action through political institutions Mindfulness of the world: the acceptance of diversity as a path to peace This — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Economics works great for planning your life when you don't have a work passion, since we tend to assume that your job delivers only money and you trade off job hours with leisure hours. If you think your job will just be a job, pick one that pays well per hour and leaves you some time off, even if the activity of the job is boring. — Emily Oster

Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a 'leisure gap' between them at home. Most women work one shift in the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home. — Arlie Russell Hochschild

On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative, and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are not being used, and therefore they tend to feel more sad, weak, dull, and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work less and spend more time in leisure.
What does this contradictory pattern mean? There are several possible explanations, but one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like. They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation. — J.G. Ballard

Many concerns now make part or the whole of their dividends from by-products that formerly went to waste. How do we, as individuals, utilize our principal by-product? Our principal by-product is, of course, our leisure time. Many years of observation forces the conclusion that a man's success or failure in life is determined as much by how he acts during his leisure as by how he acts during his work hours. Tell me how a young man spends his evenings and I will tell you how he is likely to spend the latter part of his life. — B.C. Forbes