Leisure time

“ My purpose is to provide for the leisure hours which must come to the busiest among us—no matter where we live or what sphere of life we occupy—an elevating source of enjoyment, which is at the same time calculated to strengthen those emotions that have so much influence in perpetuating a common love of country. ”

“ Sentiment has no place in industry. In the olden days those who thought that leisure was harmful usually had an interest in the products of industry. The mill-owner seldom saw the benefit of leisure time for his employees, unless he could work up his emotions. Now we can look at leisure as a cold business fact.
"It is not easy so to look at leisure, for age-old custom viewed leisure as 'lost time' -time taken out of production. ”

“ What a good thing leisure is, leisure to read and think. Nobody interrupted me, only the chimes of the old parish church told me the hour from time to time.
With measured cadence, drowsily and melodiously 13 they sounded across the snow-bound earth. “Time to dream, time to dream,” they seemed to say.
Later on came my luncheon, cutlets with onion chips and jelly. Mouse got the bones. She was polite enough to leap off the bed and to crack them on the floor—and I was grateful for small mercies. A minute afterwards, and I rang my hand-bell, and Célestine scurried down. ”

“ It is with pleasure, therefore, we observe, that so rational an employment of leisure time as the study of nature, promises to become popular; since whatever adds to the number of rural amusements, and consequently counteracts the allurements of the metropolis, is, on this consideration, of national importance. ”

“ AFTER SIX O’CLOCK FOR most of us the active business of the day is over at sundown. Mothers of large families, physicians and occasionally other workers are employed over time; but most of us can count on leisure after six o’clock. Much of our happiness depends upon how this leisure is employed. That it should afford recreation of one sort or another is a commonly accepted opinion, though one that is accepted usually without appreciation of the obligations involved. Recreation implies something more than idleness. ”

“ One reason for this is that in trading towns the time is more happily distributed; the day given to business and active duties—the evening to relaxation; on which account, books, conversation, and literary leisure are more cordially enjoyed: the same satiation never can take place which too frequently deadens the genial enjoyment of those who have a surfeit of books and a monotony of leisure. ”

“ The hope of the worker is in a shorter working day. If a shorter working day is obtained will the worker, is he able to, improve his leisure time? In other words, is a desirable and beneficial use of leisure time probable in the crowded portion of a city with its dull, monotonous scenery ”

“ Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic, literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thing valuable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half of life chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel, for social relaxation in the company of their life-time friends; a time for the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of recreation ”

“ Methinks I hear some of you say, Must a Man afford himself no Leisure? I will tell thee, my friend, what Poor Richard says, Employ thy Time well, if thou meanest to gain Leisure; and, since thou are not sure of a Minute, throw not away an Hour. ”

“ If their working day was made shorter in order to give them the opportunity of taking advantage of the free facilities for improving their minds, they loudly demanded another hour each day and frequent holidays, with the liberty of spending their leisure time as best suited their tastes. ”

“ This question of popular recreations, or to put it more broadly, how a people shall spend their leisure hours—hours when they are not at work nor asleep—is a very serious question, and one closely connected with public morals. In the life of every man in America, even of the hard-worked laborer, there are several hours in the day when he is not bending to his task, and when he is not taking his meals. The work of the day is over, he has had his supper, but it is not time to go to bed. From seven to nine o'clock he has a couple of hours of leisure. ”

“ This cultivation of the aesthetic faculty requires time and application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way. ”

“ The cheerful, interesting conversation at table, and in the odds and ends of time through the day, would be sufficient stimulus to all but the most exacting guests; while, as a matter of fact, there are always a few hours in the evening when everybody seems to be at leisure, and these form the social centre of the day. ”

“ A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man s life as in a book. Haste makes waste no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. ”

“ But with the difference that the scale of things is to be larger, the pace swifter, and the volume and dispersion of this prospective leisure class somewhat wider. The work of this leisure class—and there is neither paradox nor inconsistency in the phrase—should be patterned on the lines worked out by their prototypes of the Victorian time, but with some appreciable accentuation in the direction of what chiefly characterised the leisure class of that era of tranquility. ”

“ Many workmen—for example, those engaged in the building trades—have abundant leisure during the winter. It would be well, if they, as well as those who consume hours in attending football matches, would spend some time in developing their capacities of mind and body. ”

“ Leisure is time for doing something useful; ”

“ He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate. ”

“ Got back in time for table d'hôte, but preferred sleep to food. Went to bed.
Wednesday.—Up with the lark. Off again travelling. On the road all day. Having to fit in the corresponding trains, had no leisure for meals. Arrived at our new resting-place late at night. So off as quickly as possible to bed. ”

“ Long before autumn most of us must be back to the busy town. Business demands our work-day hours; and now, during the leisure of long winter evenings, with what delight one may recall vacation-days, reading outdoor books! ”

“ And another point is to guard against losing the small bits of leisure scattered through the day. Don't take up a magazine or a newspaper when you have fifteen minutes or a half hour of leisure alone in your room. ”

“ The only thing that cannot be denied these poor beasts of burden is their "vacation," as they call it, this ideal of leisure amid an overstrained century, where we may for once be idle, idiotic, and childish to our heart's content. ”

“ When the urge to wander far comes, and one has only a week's vacation or perhaps two weeks, it seems almost useless to try to crowd into so short a space of time the experience, travel, adventure for which one longs. ”

“ It is hard enough to be sent to bed on an ordinary night and at one’s regular time, as any child will agree, but to be forbidden the early hours of a moonlit evening outdoors, especially when one’s little head is teeming with wild, delicious ideas of flight—away from daily baths, from the cramping walls of a house, and out into the freshness and freedom of the night, which has no terror for the dwellers in tents, was well-nigh unbearable. ”

“ The latter-day leisure-class festivities and entertainments may continue in some slight degree to serve the religious need and in a higher degree the needs of recreation and conviviality, but they also serve an invidious purpose ”

“ The leisure of two afternoons and evenings could be devoted to religious and benevolent objects, such as religious meetings, charitable associations, school visiting, and attention to the sick and poor. The leisure of two other days might be devoted to intellectual improvement and the pursuits of taste. The leisure of another day might be devoted to social enjoyments, in making or receiving visits ”

“ People during the last quarter of a century have greatly increased their command of leisure. The command, as Board of Trade inspectors remind us, is not sufficient as long as the rule of seventy or even sixty hours of work a week still holds in some trades. But the weekly half-holiday has become almost universal, some skilled trades have secured an eight or nine hours’ day, many workshops every year close for a week, and the members of the building trades begin work late and knock off early during the winter months. 55There is thus much leisure available for recreation. What do the people do? ”

“ Very often the recreation of the older time consisted of hours spent with all the advantages of outdoor air, exercise, and fine {134} satisfaction of mind, perhaps in visiting the poor or the prisons or the hospitals, or in encouraging the sports of children, or in arranging for outings of various kinds in which the pleasantest of social intercourse between friends and neighbors was associated with such recreation of body as gave a good healthy weariness after a day's outing. ”

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

“ One of the evidences of progress toward "transmuting days of dreary work into happier lives" is the reduction in the hours of toil in many industries, and the consequent increase of leisure for the enjoyment of life and for self-improvement. ”

“ In a place which has been so transformed, the "eight hours of leisure" that have so troubled our sociologists will present no problem whatever; for the community chorus,90 the neighborhood orchestra, the music and dramatic clubs, and the splendid libraries and art galleries will assume most of the burden of providing a worthy use of leisure. ”

“ There is a generally accepted notion that a brief summer vacation, if at all obtainable in this busy life of ours, must be spent in a flight as far afield as time will allow; that the popular resorts in the mountains, by the seaside, or on the margins of the upper lakes must be sought for rest and enjoyment; that neighborhood surroundings should, in the mad rush for change of air and scene, be left behind. ”

“ A man with leisure got rid of some hours daily at the coffee-house, or houses, and such a one would spend from 10 A.M. till noon, and again, after his two-o'clock dinner, would be there from 4 to 6, when he would leave for the theatre, or his turn in the park. ”

“ Though no holidays were allowed, lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired, I had ample leisure in every day to amuse myself; ”

“ Suddenly the earliest milk-wagon comes jangling up from the ferry; then dawn comes up over the gas-houses along East River and it all begins over again.
... those who walk for the sake of walking.
But the most popular and populous time of all is the regular walking-home hour, not only for those who have spent the day down toward the end of the island at work, but for those who have no more serious business to look after than wandering from club to club drinking cocktails, or from house to house drinking tea. ”

“ I've been to a house-party up in Newport with some friends of mine who're in the swim, and I tell you it's hard swimming. You'll never hear me talking about a leisure class in this country again. Those people don't know what leisure is. I don't wonder they're always such a tired-looking lot. ”

“ He should find some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of the spectators. This can be done only indirectly, through the exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure so spent—in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition of tangible, lasting products of the labour performed for the gentleman of leisure by handicraftsmen and servants in his employ. ”

“ But much of the services classed as household cares in modern everyday life, and many of the "utilities" required for a comfortable existence by civilised man, are of a ceremonial character. They are, therefore, properly to be classed as a performance of leisure in the sense in which the term is here used. ”

“ The evenings are in fact a dawdle indoors as the day has been a dawdle out, a little music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat, a little letter-writing, and an early to bed.
It is this calm monotony of day after day at which [Pg 77] the world of the winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order—drives, donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. ”

“ The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have. ”

“ A good morning's work has been done, and a sufficiency of bodily exercise taken by one o'clock, at which time a move is made towards a creek flat, where on the site of a deserted sheep-station, with yards proper, of the olden time, a substantial picnic lunch is spread. Appetites of a superior description seem to be universal, and a season of hearty enjoyment succeeds to that of action. ”

“ The traveller has all the more leisure to retire, in the comfortable smoking-saloon, into the solitude of his own 409thoughts, and take stock of all that he has seen, heard and learnt in the last nine months. ”

“ Even to those, every day of a vacation has to be full of movement and change. An hour not filled by some sort of activity, spent on a piazza or under a tree, is to them an hour wasted. A land where it was always afternoon would be to them the most "odious section of country" on earth. ”

“ The long vacation is that of our venerable universities, originally designed for allowing poor scholars to beg and to take part in the all-important labours of ingathering the harvest; between July 1 and October 1{157} being the busy time at home: moreover, the lads have a long and a hard way to travel. ”