How to Be Idle Quotes

“I count it as an absolute certainty that in paradise, everyone naps. A nap is a perfect pleasure and it's useful, too. It splits the day into two halves, making each half more manageable and enjoyable. How much easier it is to work in the morning if we know we have a nap to look forward to after lunch; and how much more pleasant the late afternoon and evening become after a little sleep. If you know there is a nap to come later in the day, then you can banish forever that terrible sense of doom one feels at 9 A.M. with eight hours of straight toil ahead. Not only that, but a nap can offer a glimpse into a twilight nether world where gods play and dreams happen.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

“The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

“Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

“After the alarm clock, it is the turn of Mr Kellogg to shame us into action. 'Rise and Shine!' he exhorts us from the Corn Flakes packet. The physical act of crunching cornflakes or other cereals is portraied in TV advertising as working an amazing alchemy on slothful human beings: the incoherent, unshaven sluggard (bad) is magically transformed into a smart and jolly worker full of vigour and purpose (good) by the positive power of cereal. Kellogg himself, tellingly, was a puritanical health-nut who never had sex (he preferred enemas). Such are the architects of our daily life.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to be Idle

“We need to be responsible for ourselves; we must create our own republics. Today we hand over our responsibility to the boss, to the company, to government, and then blame them when everything goes wrong.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed. In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle. He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.” In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.” Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind. Freud called introspection “morbid”—unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world. The”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“The pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of beings; he walks for pleasure, he observes but does not interfere, he is not in a hurry, he is happy in the company of his own mind, he wanders detached, wise and merry, godlike. He is free.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous. Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in “An Apology for Idlers” (1885): “Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“You don’t get ads on the Underground saying: “Tired? Then Sleep More,” as no one has figured out how to make money this way.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“the fat cats used to send us into the mills to make their millions, and now they send us to the shopping centres.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Let us add also that the urban pub has been fiercely undermined by the gym. Instead of heading straight to the pub after work, an increasing number of pleasure-hating lunatics appear to enjoy going to the gym, where instead of quaffing foaming pints of nut-brown ale in convivial company they run alone on treadmills while watching MTV on giant screens to distract them from their agony. If you really want to exercise, then why not find a pub that is a one-mile walk from the office or home? That way, you ' ll walk two miles every day and have a good time.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

“To walk out of your front door as if you’ve just arrived from a foreign country; to discover the world in which you already live; to begin the day as if you’ve just gotten off the boat from Singapore and have never seen your own doormat or the people on the landing . . . it is this that reveals the humanity before you, unknown until now.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics. It is an enervating force. We should resist it and embrace tea, the ancient drink of poets, philosophers and meditators.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“there is a lot to enjoy in life if you make the effort to go out there and drink it in.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“How much better life would be if we began the day with a poem rather than the empty prattle of newspapers, with their diet of fear, hate, envy and jealousy.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“the terrible irony is that when our current job turns out to provide neither much money nor much fun, we think we can solve the problem by getting a better job. So it goes on: an endless cycle, a miserable set-up, as satirized brilliantly in the UK sitcom The Office.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“there is a vast gap between the promise of the job and its reality. When we enter the ignoble world of work, we are soon shocked at the humiliations we encounter there.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“The idea of the “job” as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is “full employment.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives!”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“If you want health, wealth and happiness, the first step is to throw away your alarm clocks!”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Winston Churchill, who abhorred laziness in other people, himself took a nap every afternoon. He defended his afternoon doze in practical terms as an absolute necessity: You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one—well, at least one and a half, I’m sure. When the war started, I had to sleep during the day because that was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Most countries have a serious news show first thing in the morning. This has the effect of stimulating such emotions as anger and anxiety in the listener. But a certain type of person feels it is their duty to listen to it, as if the act of merely listening is somehow going to improve the world.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“This distinction is made in the Chinese language between shuohua (speaking) and t’anhua (conversation), which implies the discourse is more chatty and leisurely and the topics of conversation are more trivial and less business-like.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Worldwide, the mania for consumer goods has created a deadly culture of overwork.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Sex for idlers should be messy, drunken, bawdy, lazy. It should be wicked, wanton and lewd, dirty to the point where it is embarrassing to look at one another in the morning.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Wilde’s formulation of art’s purpose: “[What art] seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“as Charles Handy puts it: “It has always seemed to me slightly bizarre that we should queue up to sell our time to someone else. It’s a form of slavery, voluntary slavery. We think it’s great but it’s crazy.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto

“Real dreams are about seeing what others miss. If you have your head in the clouds, you can see the world more clearly. Maybe this is why so many poets and visionaries die young or drink heavily—it is painful when you can see the truth up close. It can be unbearable.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto