Leisured Quotes & Sayings

It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out. — John Stuart Mill

GRASS, LIKE NEARLY EVERYTHING else in China, is subject to political interpretation. Historically, the Chinese have taken a dim view of grass. In Peking's parks, the dirt is swept daily, since cleanliness is prized, but gardeners relentlessly uproot any tuft of grass. Grass breeds disease, generations of Chinese have been taught. Additionally, Communist doctrine teaches that grass is decadent, since it is usually associated with leisured classes and generates exploitation - one man hiring another to cut it. — Carl Hiaasen

The 'leisured' wife was a badge of achievement, the ornament to hard work and virtue for families on the way up. — Hilda Scott

The whole man was in all his judgments and activities, and a discriminating zest for life, for 'common life', informs every page he wrote. He saw education as actualizing the potentiality for the leisured activities of thought, art, literature and conversation. 'Grete clerk' as he was, he was never willfully esoteric: quotations and allusions rose unbidden to the surface of his full and fertile mind, but whether drawn from Tristram Shandy or James Thurber they elucidate not decorate. His works are all of a piece: a book in one genre will correct, illumine, or amplify what is latent in another. — Jocelyn Gibb

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness. — P.G. Wodehouse

It is the leisured, I have noticed, who rebel the most at an interruption of routine. — Phyllis McGinley

What a glorious world Almighty God has given us. How thankless and ungrateful we are, and how we labor to mar his gifts. — Robert E.Lee

Being, be bold and venture to be wise. — Horace

All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth. — Quentin Crisp

I'm sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class. Actually. — Angela Carter

Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent. — Victor Davis Hanson

Despite the theories traditionally taught in high-school social studies, the truth is: the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life. — Peter Farb

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure. — Cyril Connolly

Again, do you call those men leisured who spend many hours at the barber's simply to cut whatever grew overnight, to have a serious debate about every separate hair, to tidy up disarranged locks or to train thinning ones from the sides to lie over the forehead? — Seneca.

I think the sea has thrown itself upon me and been answered, at least in part, and I believe I am a little changed - not essentially, but changed and transubstantiated as anyone is who has asked a question and been answered. — Hart Crane

I am a disciplined person. When I am writing, I write for 7-8 hours. — Amish Tripathi

Like every other good thing in this
world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however,
it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us be
duly thankful for that, my dear Denis
duly thankful. — Aldous Huxley

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good. — Andrew O'Hagan

The only really leisured people are those who devote time to acquiring true knowledge rather than trivia. — Seneca.

It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure. — William Butler Yeats

In the swastika, the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work. — Adolf Hitler

Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

God, Atlantis was only yesterday. Let alone Los Angeles. Remember that incarnation in Los Angeles? — Frederick Lenz

Suicide is an escape from life. What is life? An escape from death. This means that each of us must die twice. There is the death waiting us ahead, and the death that comes pursuing us from behind. Your trouble is that you're confused, Once you are free at least from the death that comes pursuing you, you can relax and enjoy life as you go along. — Kobo Abe

Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes - affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism - the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response. — Victor Davis Hanson

Every U.S. president enters office promising stronger ties with our southern neighbors, only to thereupon largely ignore them. — Thomas P.M. Barnett

Claritypoint: Your value does not come from what you look like, what you experience, or what you do. It comes from your love and the fact that you are a divine, irreplaceable child of God. — Kimberly Giles

And see the peaceful trees extend
their myriad leaves in leisured dance
they bear the weight of sky and cloud
upon the fountain of their veins. — Kathleen Raine

I love my daddy. My daddy's everything. I hope I can find a man that will treat me as good as my dad. — Lady Gaga

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? — Ernest Gaines

I want 'Vogue' to be pacy, sharp, and sexy - I'm not interested in the super-rich or infinitely leisured. I want our readers to be energetic executive women, with money of their own and a wide range of interests. There is a new kind of woman out there. She's interested in business and money. — Anna Wintour

I always felt big and unattractive. — Sheri L. Dew

We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. — Elena Ferrante