Quotes About Work And Leisure

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Seamus Heaney

#4. If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

Gunter Grass

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for.

Christopher Dawson

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. This is the first great problem of modern democracy ... how to get a fair living by reasonable hours of work leaving enough leisure for both childhood and manhood.

John R. Commons

#22. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Bertrand Russell

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Leisure consists in all those virtuous activities by which a man grows morally, intellectually, and spiritually. It is that which makes a life worth living.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

Henry David Thoreau

#30. I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

Jared Diamond

#31. 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

#32. Although I understand that all days are equal with 24 hours each, most of us agree that Friday is the longest day of the week and Sunday the shortest!

D.S. Mixell

#33. 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

#34. 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.

J.G. Ballard

#35. Happiness seems to depend on leisure, because we work to have leisure, and wage war to live in peace.

Aristotle.

#36. The secret to the city is integration. Every area of the city should combine work, leisure and culture. Separate these functions and parts of the city die.

Jaime Lerner

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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.

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. To work, to work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be reputable. I think I always respected a goodblacksmith more than a lady of leisure.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

#45. If the soul has food for study and learning, nothing is more delightful than an old age of leisure.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#46. To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,
To lie flat and know nothing and be still,
Are the two trades of man; and which is worse
I know not, but I know that both are ill.

A.E. Housman

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.

Pearl S. Buck

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

Kato Lomb

#52. 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

#53. I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to be human, and one does better work if one has a circle of friends that is active.

Niall Ferguson

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

Brigid Schulte

#55. I have an inability to relax. I try to make every day a work day. I get pleasure from work ... I try to think of sketch ideas, stand-up pieces. I am incapable of leisure and leisure time.

Fred Armisen

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care.

Oscar Wilde

#59. 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

#60. A third ... candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.

Bill Bryson