Well Spent Vacation Quotes & Sayings

I have never gone on a real trip, never taken a holiday. The best holiday for me is spent in my workshops when nearly everybody else is on vacation. — Enzo Ferrari

Let me tell you how at one time the famous mathematician Euclid became a physician. It was during a vacation, which I spent in Prague as I most always did, when I was attacked by an illness never before experienced, which manifested itself in chilliness and painful weariness of the whole body. In order to ease my condition I took up Euclid's Elements and read for the first time his doctrine of ratio, which I found treated there in a manner entirely new to me. The ingenuity displayed in Euclid's presentation filled me with such vivid pleasure, that forthwith I felt as well as ever. — Bernard Bolzano

Altogether, I had derived little benefit from being in Balbec, for which reason I was all the more determined to come back one day. I felt I had spent too short a time there. — Marcel Proust

Say you spend thirty minutes driving in rush hour every morning and another fifteen getting to your car and into the office. That's 1.5 hours a day, 7.5 hours per week, or somewhere between 300 and 400 hours per year, give or take holidays and vacation. Four hundred hours is exactly the amount of programmer time we spent building Basecamp, our most popular product. Imagine what you could do with 400 extra hours a year. Commuting isn't just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment - it's bad for business. — Jason Fried

The mother of a student in Europe who was between his junior and senior years of high school called Motto in a frantic state. She had just read somewhere that college admissions offices looked for kids who had spent their summers in enriching ways, ideally doing charity work, and her son was due to be on vacation with the rest of the family in August. "Should we ditch our plans," she asked Motto, "and have him build dirt roads?" Motto reminded her that she lived in a well-paved European capital. "Where would these dirt roads be?" he said. "India?" she suggested. "Africa?" She hadn't worked it out. But if Yale might be impressed by an image of her son with a small spade, large shovel, rake or jackhammer in his chafed hands, she was poised to find a third-world setting that would produce that sweaty and ennobling tableau. — Frank Bruni

Rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? — Charles Lamb

Early in the summer of 1980, shortly after his son turned three, A. and the boy spent a week together in the country, in a house owned by friends who were off on vacation. A. noticed that Superman was playing in a local theater and decided to take the boy, on the off-chance that he would be able to sit through it. For the first half of the film, the boy was calm, working his way through a bin of popcorn, whispering his questions as A. had instructed him to do, and taking the business of exploding planets, rocket ships, and outer space without much fuss. But then something happened. Superman began to fly, and all at once the boy lost his composure. His mouth dropped open, he stood up in his seat, spilled his popcorn, pointed at the screen, and began to shout: Look! Look! He's flying! — Paul Auster

Up until 1950 most families' discretionary income did not cover much more than an occasional meal away from home; a beer or two after work; a weekly trip to the movies, amusement park, or beach; and perhaps a yearly vacation, usually spent at the home of relatives. Few households had washing machines and dryers. Refrigerators had only tiny spaces for freezing ice and had to be defrosted at least once a week. Few houses had separate bedrooms for all the children. — Stephanie Coontz

I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free.
Character building, my father said.
Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.
Still, it was better than jail.
I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The appeal of the paranormal bad boy - or James Bond super-spy, as one example of male escapism - can sometimes make everyday problems seem less dire. Thus, a few hours spent immersed in the world of the wicked yet alluring hero is the equivalent of a mini-vacation. — Jeaniene Frost

Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still - that's how you build a future. — Arthur Miller

Happiness is sitting down to watch some slides of your neighbor's vacation and finding out that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony. — Johnny Carson

The rainy winter days passed quickly. Thanksgiving came and not long afterward Christmas vacation. Ramona missed Daisy, who went with her family to visit her grandparents. When she returned, the girls spent an afternoon dressing up Roberta in the clothes she had received for Christmas. Roberta was agreeable to having a dress pulled over her head, her arms stuffed into a sweater, her head shoved into caps. She enjoyed the girls' admiration. She was not so happy about a pair of crocheted slippers with ears and tails that looked like rabbits, a gift from Howie's grandmother, who enjoyed crocheting. Roberta did not care for the slippers. — Beverly Cleary

Several weeks of summer vacation in the Thirties I spent working at $15 a week in the FORBES office ... I worked in the mail cage, where envelopes were slit and subscription payments extracted. Dad used to come pounding down the office aisle and pause long enough to ask, How much today? Inevitably the answer was inadequate-except once. That day the controller said excitedly, Mr. Forbes, the ledger shows a slight profit this month! ... My father turned to him and said, Young man, I don't give a damn what your books show. Do we have any money in the bank? — Malcolm Forbes

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding
shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs. — Hunter S. Thompson

So I sat on the grimy floor of an eighteenth-century corn mill and watched my fiance heal the guy I loved.
"Wow," I muttered. "I'm gonna have one messed-up 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' essay when I get back to Hex Hall. — Rachel Hawkins

I would caution against fueling cheap populism. First of all, every German who has spent a vacation in Greece knows that the standard of living there isn't higher than it is in Germany. Second, Greece is paying a high price for European assistance. — Wolfgang Schauble

Over the years, I've spent time in Saudi Arabia, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Kenya, among other vacation hotspots. — Alex Berenson

Time well spent results in more money to spend, more money to save, and more time to vacation. — Zig Ziglar