Guy Debord Quotes

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

We seldom enjoy leisure we haven't earned.

When a man's busy, why leisure Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: 'Faith, and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy.

It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.

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.

Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler.

If you can't save your own life, is it even worth saving?

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

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A man is to have part of his life to himself.

If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

Most of the time when I'm in Australia I'm not really working, it seems. I'm just at home, getting on with renovating my house or writing music or whatever. So I get back to doing all the stuff that I naturally do. Whereas if I'm away working, that's all there is to do, is to concentrate on the work.

There can be no education without leisure; and without leisure, education is worthless.

As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.

To be successful, you need leisure. You need time hanging heavily on your hands.

Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,--work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.

As a professional journalist, I have always been fascinated by people who appear to have even more spare time than I do.

I think that obviously the quest for purpose, or meaning, or understanding to existence is something that I always think about, always deal with. I guess everybody does - that existential crisis of human condition. It's nothing new. But I'd love to come across something that really made me believe in something.

The children are being conditioned to think that the purpose of life is to get a good job. You get paid but you don't get satisfaction from your work.

Leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure.

To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.

Our mission in life is not to discover our fate as we go along, or even to procreate, but rather to fill up the endless gray void that is time.