Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow, The faucet leak, and learn to leave them so.

Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.

In preindustrial cultures leisure is scarcely a burden or a "problem" because it is built into the ritual and ground plan of life for which people are conditioned in childhood; often they possess a relatively timeless attitude toward events.

In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.

If you want to get a true estimate of a man, observe what he does when he has nothing to do.

The real problem of your leisure is to keep other people from using it.

Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.

What is this life, if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?