Pastime Quotes & Sayings

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition. — Michael Richardson

She was heading for the piano, and something told me that it was her intention to sing old folk songs, a pastime to which, as I have indicated, she devoted not a little of her leisure. She was particularly given to indulgence in this nuisance when her soul had been undergoing an upheaval and required soothing, as of course it probably did at this juncture.
My fears were realized. She sang two in rapid succession, and the thought that this sort of thing would be a permanent feature of our married life chilled me to the core. — P.G. Wodehouse

You're not a gardener, are you? So perhaps you don't know that once a garden is established, much of good gardening is about removal rather than planting, honing what you have to produce a pleasing effect, sacrificing the particular for the good of the whole. Gardening is a creative pastime, but the result is always a work in progress; unlike a painting or a piece of music a garden is never fixed in time. ("In The Garden") — Rosalie Parker

Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime. — Ken Burns

It is always a vulgar and often an unhealthy pastime, and it is a vice which does not go alone; the man who gambles will find himself capable of any evil. — Jules Verne

If I were to name my favorite pastime, I'd have to say talking about myself. I love it and I think most other people do too. We need, people like us, more listeners and less talkers. — Hedy Lamarr

Baseball is really two sports
the summer game and the autumn game. One is the leisurely pastime of our national mythology. The other is not so gentle. — Thomas Boswell

How sometimes nature will betray its folly, Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime To harder bosoms! — William Shakespeare

Complaining is the favorite pastime of millions. — Mason Cooley

What began as an apparently harmless pastime has ended up as a frightening, overpowering addiction or obsession. — Billy Graham

Perhaps the chief cause which has retarded the progress of poetry in America, is the want of that exclusive cultivation, which so noble a branch of literature would seem to require. Few here think of relying upon the exertion of poetic talent for a livelihood, and of making literature the profession of life. The bar or the pulpit claims the greater part of the scholar's existence, and poetry is made its pastime. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime. The fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets - a connotation of moon and tides - the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea foam and billowy cloud crystallized in a pipe of fancy. — Joseph Cornell

It's no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it's sanctimony. — Nathan Hill

I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction? — Arthur Smith

There is that American pastime known as "kidding" - with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything. — Brenda Ueland

We spend our spare time taking care of little things. I can watch a little bit of college and professional football if I want to ... Our favorite pastime is trying to take pictures of our hometowns from space. — Kevin A. Ford

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go. — Cesare Pavese

Moving provides meaning for our humble (if still vicious) life of four-dimensional existence. Four-dimensional existence makes the frightening fox hunt into an entertainment, or war into a pastime or a sport. Even when evil is dull and monotonous, there tends to be a lot of movement, action and entertainment involved.
Maybe movies are evil. — Gus Van Sant

Now it is a pleasant pastime, a joy and pleasure, to read the Bible and religious books, tracts, and papers, whereby I can learn more of the beauties of a life of salvation. May God help sinners everywhere to seek him while he may be found. — E.E. Byrum

Music is a pastime, a relaxation from more serious occupations. — Alexander Borodin

So it is that supernatural horror is the product of a profoundly divided species of being. It is not the pastime of even our closest relations in the wholly natural world: we gained it, as part of our gloomy inheritance, when we became what we are. Once awareness of the human predicament was achieved, we immediately took off in two directions, splitting ourselves down the middle. One half became dedicated to apologetics, even celebration, of our new toy of consciousness. The other half condemned and occasionally launched direct assaults on this gift. — Thomas Ligotti

I came up with the best pastime in the history of man. What you do is find an aerosol tin of spray adhesive, such as you would use to stick posters to a wall. You then lie in wait and when a wasp flies by, you leap out and give it a squirt. Bingo. One minute it's flying; the next it's tumbling silently out of the sky with a confused look on its stupid little face. — Jeremy Clarkson

I think the dual existence thing is a regular pastime for all human beings, and for that matter anything in this universe. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I feel like my dating life has become a national pastime, and Im not comfortable providing that entertainment anymore. — Taylor Swift

Seeking out causes is a pastime of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect. Everything is its own cause. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The game of chess is the most fascinating and intellectual pastime which the wisdom of antiquity has bequeathed to us. — Howard Staunton

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here. — Phyllis McGinley

Golf is the art of driving hard, avoiding the rough, surmounting traps and hazards, aiming straight, and arriving on the green at last, only to end up in a hole in the ground before your companions. The favored pastime of businessmen and their cronies, probably without a full appreciation of its metaphorical implications. — Rick Bayan

I love to cook. It is a simple pastime. — Haylie Duff

What earthly good is golf? Life is stern and life is earnest. We live in a practical age. All around us we see foreign competition making itself unpleasant. And we spend our time playing golf? What do we get out of it? Is golf any use? That's what I'm asking you. Can you name me a single case where devotion to this pestilential pastime has done a man any practical good? — P.G. Wodehouse

Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure. — John Thorn

From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well ... — Michel De Montaigne

He applied himself to that pastime with great industry, — Joseph Conrad

It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them. — Leo Tolstoy

Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue. — August Wilhelm Von Schlegel

Some people are better at maths than others: no one thinks you can be 'taught' to be a mathematical genius. And no one thinks of teaching, in that context, as a kind of forcing of the will. But there seems to be an idea of writing as an intuitive pastime which is being dishonestly subjected to counterintuitive methods. — Rachel Cusk

Anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought. — Leigh Hunt

Aden St. George managed to avoid having to kill the guard stationed outside his quarry's crypt-like cell, although the thug outside the caves hadn't been so lucky. Still, that bastard had tried to knife him in the gut so Aden could hardly be faulted for returning the favor. And knowing what he did about the men who'd kidnapped Lady Vivien Shaw, he wouldn't waste his fitful conscience on that brutal but necessary act. Killing was not a favorite pastime, but only rarely did it disturb his sleep.
Tonight's rescue mission carried no inconvenient opportunities for remorse since a woman's life and innocence hung in the balance. True, the gossips whispered that Lady Vivien's innocence was an open question, but what would happen to her if Aden failed wasn't. Without his intervention she would disappear into a nightmarish life, forever beyond the protection of her family and friends. — Vanessa Kelly

... is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change? — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that the people who really enjoy chess are the dubs and the duffers, experts who have resigned their ambitions, those who play only for pastime, and, of course, the great fraternity of the kibbitzers. — Alfred Kreymborg

Another lesson to file away about Scotland: insulting other people in a childish manner was the national pastime. — Molly Ringle

You know this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you've been a boy, and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in our national pastime. — George Herman

If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored. — Leo Tolstoy

Travelling with a tail-end ball club is the poorest pastime in the world. I would rather ride in the first coach of a funeral procession. — Christy Mathewson

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author. — Arthur Miller

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television. — Bob Greene

Game of deducing a person's character from that person's appearance is an old pastime with racists and with those who seek an advantage over the poor or the ugly, the disabled, or any underrepresented minority. — Charles Baxter

Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn't read, I don't know what I'd do. But as a writer, it's both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along. — Anna Quindlen

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. — Wislawa Szymborska

True fans of the Constitution, like true fans of the national pastime, acknowledge the critical role of human judgment in making tough calls. We don't expect flawless interpretation. We expect good faith. We demand honesty. — Eric Liu

I don't think I'd like to argue with you," I say. "I think it would be a very dissatisfying pastime. — Maggie Stiefvater

Fishing the small streams of New Hampshire is a pastime that combines hiking, map reading, and bushwhacking - plenty of it. — Joseph Monninger

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime. — Natalie Goldberg

However we pass Time, he passes still,
Passing away whatever the pastime,
And, whether we use him well or ill,
Some day he gives us the slip for the last time. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

The national pastime is juiced. — Jose Canseco

Today, to allege corruption seems to be the pastime of most people. All kinds of allegations are leveled. I think it is self-defeating. — P. Chidambaram

Baseball has long been a national pastime that many Americans have cherished. — Jim Sensenbrenner

We should leave people alone about their weight. Being skinny for a while (provided you actually eat food and don't take pills or smoke to get there) is a perfectly fine pastime. Everyone should try it once, like a super-short haircut or dating a white guy. — Tina Fey

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people. — Robert Benchley

I'm obsessed with beards. First of all, beards make you look like more of an animal. Second, I kind of like biting beards; it's a pastime of mine. — Kesha

And then a scholar said, "Speak of talking." And he answered, saying: "And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. — Kahlil Gibran

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive. — George Orwell

The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books. — Robertson Davies

Pain s the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter. — Seth Godin

I'm not sure I would make a direct connection between having press attention as a young person and being interested in the media as an older person. I came to it more organically, coming from a family of Irish Catholic storytellers. Storytelling is a pastime and important part of my family's history and culture. — Rory Kennedy

There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance
physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its 'national pastime' pedestal in less than fifteen years. — Hunter S. Thompson

The doctor said a ball hit me. But I don't remember batting." "You were in the dugout. Henry made a bad throw." "Henry did? Really? Are you sure?" "Yes." "Well, it's always the ones you least suspect." Owen let his eyes fall shut. "I don't remember anything at all. Was I reading?" Affenlight nodded. "I warned you. It's a dangerous pastime. — Chad Harbach

And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts. She had never been in close contact with such people - there was no one to compare him with except those inspired eccentrics, musicians and poets whose image one knows as clearly and as vaguely as that of a Roman Emperor, an inquisitor or a comedy miser. Her memory contained a modest dimly lit gallery with a sequence of all the people who had in any way caught her fancy. — Vladimir Nabokov

PASTIME, n. A device for promoting dejection. Gentle exercise for intellectual debility. — Ambrose Bierce

Crafting, or 'making things,' has always been a delightful pastime of mine because it requires putting common elements together in order to achieve a lovely something that nobody needs. — Amy Sedaris

Boxing has always been a primarily urban pastime (whereas the defining suburban sport is auto-racing, in which the machine and its anonymous mechanics hold far greater importance than the driver). When white Americans left the cities, they left boxing as well. — A.J. Liebling

For crying out loud, stop comparing and start living! And you'll be happier with your life, I guarantee. This is crucial: the most difficult thing in the world is to be who you are not. Pretending and trying to be someone else is the official pastime of the human race. And the easiest thing in the world is to be yourself. Be happy. Live! There must be a reason why God made you tall or short or fat or thin or bumpy all over. Love who you are! — Bo Sanchez

My favorite pastime is staring out the window. When I go on tour, I can spend hours and hours just staring out the window, thinking about nothing. I love all that. — Noel Gallagher

World-building is my favorite pastime, so with me, I'm always about reining myself in. I don't want to lose too much of the mystery by hammering every detail to death. I did fiddle with lots of maps for 'Glass Sword,' as the second installment sees Mare, Cal and company traveling throughout their country, and that's always fun for me. — Victoria Aveyard

Baking is my pastime. I just love creating things. But it's not what I want to do for a living. Acting is what I want to do. — Ed Oxenbould

Food as a hobby used to be an elite pastime, and it has become something that is totally ordinary for people of every background. In that way, we see the growing up of the American food scene: that it's okay to be a regular person and be really into food. — Dana Goodyear

Taking offense has become America's national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them. — George Will

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading
once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive
is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. — Alberto Manguel

Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one criterion, when it comes to emulating and training for genuinely useful Neolithic skills! Think about it. The game consists of lots of patient waiting and watching (stalking), throwing with incredible accuracy and speed, sprinting, dodging ... and hitting moving objects real hard with clubs! And arguing. Hey, what else could you possibly need? Now, tell me, how do soccer or basketball prepare you to survive in the wild, hm? — David Brin

There's one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture know as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between "ideals," and with luck they won't have left their genes behind because they'll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they're too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. After that we may get some peace and quiet for a change. — John Brunner

As a composer seeking to remain anonymous I am shy of confessing my musical activity. This is intelligible enough. For others it is their chief business, the occupation and aim of life. For me it is a relaxation, a pastime which distracts me from my principal business, my professorship. I love my profession and my science. I love the Academy and my pupils, male and female, because to direct the work of young people, one must be close to them. — Alexander Borodin

It's one thing to win a game with a base hit, or to save a game by pitching a scoreless ninth ... it's something altogether different to save our National Pastime by day in and day out showing up with the joy and passion of a kid playing Little League and the determined attitude and work ethic of a consummate professional bent on doing one thing and one thing only: his job. — Tucker Elliot

Being the chief minister of a regional government is just a pastime compared with the hellish job of being prime minister of two different communities brought together. — Elio Di Rupo

I love how the men stand around cooking the barbie while the women have done all the work beforehand doing the marinade and making the salads and then everybody says, 'what a great barbie' to the guy cooking. A barbecue is just the ultimate blokes' pastime, isn't it? — Curtis Stone

Controversy and contention are weakening habits. If Satan can succeed in creating in us the pastime of arguing, quarreling, and contention, it is easier for him to bind us with heavier sins which can destroy our eternal lives. Anger is a poor substitute for self-mastery and compassionate service. — Marvin J. Ashton

When you doubt God's goodness, you hug sins tightly to your bosom, afraid that God will rob you of your crutch, your pastime, your pleasure. — Erwin W. Lutzer

Shooting is my principal pastime. — William S. Burroughs

It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime. — Queen Elizabeth II

I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime accomplishment. — Sara Coleridge

Hunger makes dinners, pastime suppers. — George Herbert

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories - and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures. — Mark Twain

I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines. — Bobbie Ann Mason

There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all. — Lou Gehrig

I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Homes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it. — Arthur Conan Doyle

It's not anti-semitic to criticize Israel, but it's the most socially acceptable pastime of anti-semites. — Annoymous

Baseball is our national pastime, that is if you discount political campaigning. — Ronald Reagan

Thus it should appear to everyone that the best pastime of all is to be often in good company, far from unworthy men and from unworthy activities from which no good can come. — Geoffroi De Charny

But it does imply that the search for scapegoats - a particularly alluring pastime in individualistic cultures such as ours in the United States - is a blind alley. — Peter M. Senge

Jeb crouches to fill in the sketch's lower half with paint. His lips twist to a cruel sneer. "That's your favorite pastime, right? And you'll have your prince of moths for company. — A.G. Howard

The sportsman knows that a sport is a recreation, a game, an amusement and a pastime, but his eyes are fixed on a higher goal, on the most important thing in his life, which is his education or his vocation. — Avery Brundage