William Butler Yeats Quotes

We need leisure ... because with us every man is of the ruling class.

Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.

What could be wiser and to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it.

There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.

The leisure class is one in which individuals have sufficient economic security and sufficient leisure to find opportunity for a variety of satisfactions in life.

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.

This is the great luxury of not working: the moment you read a book that has nothing to do with work, you know you're really relaxed. And I have a sh*t attention span. I can't concentrate for more than five minutes.

The English, of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some concept of liberty, and set some value on it, but the very idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them.

I simply make this point, that the monarchy in so far, as it is identified with what is, in my opinion, an obsolete class structure, is making a mistake, and the task of those who are responsible for the conduct of the monarchical institution is to detach it from that class structure.

The poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental sorrow.

Society is the offspring of leisure; and to acquire this forms the only rational motive for accumulating wealth, notwithstanding the cant that prevails on the subject of labor.

St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.

In the Conservative Party we have no truck with outmoded Marxist doctrine about class warfare. For us it is not who you are, who your family is or where you come from that matters, but what you are and what you can do for your country that counts.

The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich. ... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

I'm a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It's all about my daughter - I'm no longer the star of my own movie.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

It is not what people do when they work, but what they do when they don't work that causes all their troubles.

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.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.

Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.

I think there is clearly a connection between free time and procrastination. The more you have of the former, all things being equal, the more likely you are to procrastinate.