"Leisured" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... world at peace, the Consulate had leisured to reconstruct the constitution. The capability of Napoleon ensured the successful performance of this mighty task. He was bent on giving a firm government to France since this would help him to reach the height of his ambitions. He drew up the famous Civil Code ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... motion, like Paris itself, and knowing not repose? He is all legs. No physiognomy could preserve its purity amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at thirty, an old man, his stomach tanned by repeated doses of brandy, will be held, according to certain leisured philosophers, to be happier than the huckster is. The one perishes in a breath, and the other by degrees. From his eight industries, from the labor of his shoulders, his throat, his hands, from his wife and his business, the one derives—as ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... need not now speak, nor of the best method of seeing to it that somebody else paid for the necessary twenty-four stamps. But certainly one took more trouble in suiting the tastes of those who were to receive the cards than the richest and most leisured grown-up would take in selecting a diamond necklace for his wife's stocking or motor-cars for his sons-in-law. It was not only a question of snow, but also of the words in which the old, old wish ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... not question the intentions of civilisation—they are most honourable. To be clean, warm, well nourished, healthy, decently leisured, and free to move quickly about the world, are certainly pure benefits. And these are presumably the prime objects of our toil and ingenuity, the ideals to be served, by the discovery of steam, electricity, modern industrial machinery, telephony, flying. If ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... tells us, Dickens was in a merrier mood, and published 'Our Mutual Friend,' a book that has, as our critic says, 'a thoroughly human hero and a thoroughly human villain.' This work is 'a satire dealing with the whims and pleasures of the leisured class.' But this is by no means a monopoly of the so-called idle rich: the hardworking middle and poorer classes have whims and pleasures in a like manner, but have not so much ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... tell us that the world is right in looking for nobler motives and ideals, a higher standard of conduct, better, sweeter manners, from those who are highly placed than from the ruck of men; and as this higher, better life, which is only possible in the leisured classes, is correlated with the "aspects which please," the regular features and personal beauty, the conclusion is the beauty and goodness or "inward ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... yearnings of her heart to some one who would understand her, prompted the first letter; which, according to M. de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, was dictated by her to Anna's governess, Mlle. Henriette Borel. So she started lightly on the road which was to lead her, the leisured and elegant great lady suffering only from ennui, to the period of her life during which she would toil hour after hour at writing, would be overwhelmed by business, pestered by duns and creditors, overworked, overburdened, and over-worried. She was certainly not very fortunate, for she seems ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... July we had all been dining at Saint-Leu with M. le Duc de Bourbon, an old cousin of ours, who never meddled with politics, and led a leisured and delightful life between Chantilly and Saint-Leu, never coming to Paris except to pass through it, although the beautiful palace there which bears his name, the Palais Bourbon, belonged to him. His great passion was for sport, in which he excelled; and my father had made a friend of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... names correctly! Oh, to be well informed, discoursing at ease on every subject that a lady started! But it would take one years. With an hour at lunch and a few shattered hours in the evening, how was it possible to catch up with leisured women, who had been reading steadily from childhood? His brain might be full of names, he might have even heard of Monet and Debussy; the trouble was that he could not string them together into a sentence, he could not make them "tell," he could not quite forget about his ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... and bleak realism in the suffering classes it is commonly supposed that the more leisured classes stand for certain legitimate ideas which also have their place in life; such as history, reverence, the love of the land. Well, it might be no bad thing to have something, even if it were something narrow, that testified to the truths of religion or patriotism. ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... has had more time than the American man to cultivate the more amiable—if you will, the more showy—qualities of American civilisation. The leisured class of England consists of both sexes, that of America practically of one only. The problem of the American man so far has mainly been to subdue a new continent to human uses, while the woman has been sacrificing on the altar of the Graces. Hence the wider culture and the more liberal views ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... intervening years. It is a fairly steep slope of hemispherical contour interspersed with low bushes; the summit (upon which now stands our lovely English village of Battle and the residence of one of those cultured and leisured men who form the framework of our commonwealth) was then ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... said, was but one sample establishment. Hundreds of thousands of women were subsequently at the same work in various parts. The girls were drawn from all classes, and comprised school-teachers, domestic servants, shopgirls, stenographers, and the leisured daughters of the middle ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... and I began our work together the question was frequently asked why women alone were working for effective voting? The answer was simple. There were few men with leisure in South Australia, and, if there were, the leisured man was scarcely likely to take up reform work. When I first seized hold of this reform women as platform speakers were unheard of. Indeed, the prejudice was so strong against women in public life that although ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... when John Coxeter stands in Wimpole Street, so typical a Londoner belonging to the leisured and conventional class that none of the people passing by even glance his way, he lives again through the immortal moment when she ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... leisured pursuits, there are few less attractive to the thinking man than sitting in a dark cupboard waiting for a house-party to go to bed; and Sam, who had established himself in the one behind the piano at a quarter to eight, soon began to feel as if he had been there for an eternity. ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... did not at the time enjoy in England, and that King's College was less illiberal than were the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; but the circumstances were widely different. In England the Anglicans comprised the bulk of the people, and almost the whole of the cultivated and leisured classes; in Nova Scotia they were in the minority. Yet when, in 1820 and again in 1838, an attempt was made to found Dalhousie College at Halifax on a more liberal basis, the opposition of {36} the Church of England led to the failure of ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... some of the stories are too long. To whom, once more, I answer, that whoso has aught else to do would be foolish to read them, albeit they were short. And though, now that I approach the end of my labours, 'tis long since I began to write, I am not, therefore, oblivious that 'twas to none but leisured ladies that I made proffer of my pains; nor can aught be long to him that reads but to pass the time, so only he thereby accomplish his purpose. Succinctness were rather to be desired by students, who are at pains not merely to pass, but usefully to employ, their time, than by you, who have ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment" should be conventionally called "society verse," or "occasional verse," is not very clear. To write "society verse" is to be the laureate of the cultured, leisured, pleasure-loving upper classes; but some poets satisfy the above requirements—Locker himself included—yet certainly do not write exclusively of or for "Society." Then again, what is "occasional"? Many serious ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... I fear he exists only for the novelists, who created him in order to have a literary person with enough time on his hands to pursue the adventures required by the plot. Yet in so far as he is intended as a portrait of a critic, he stands as an ideal of the leisured view of books. There has been no leisured view of books in America since Thoreau, or Washington Irving. Even Poe was feverish. Our books are read on the subway, or after the theater, and so I fear it is in London—in London ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... bourgeoisie where the wife is always the husband's partner, following a custom of centuries, and who to-day is merely carrying on the business alone, there will be no surrender of responsibilities grown precious, no sense of apprehension of loss of personal power. But in those more leisured circles where, for instance, a woman has been for the first time complete mistress of all expenditures, domestic or administrative, and of her childrens' destinies; has learned to think and act for herself as if she were widowed in fact; and in addition has cultivated her social sense to an extreme ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the suppression of greater crimes, the care of the means of communication, all those duties which fall to the central government, were badly done, if done at all. It must be remembered that there was one difficulty in the way—the absence of any noble or leisured class to be entrusted with the greater offices. As I have shown in another chapter, there was no one between the king and the villager—no noble, no landowner, no wealthy or educated class at all. The king had to seek for his ministers among the ordinary people, consequently the men who were ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... hasty methods, but no argument at all against a gentle and slow-moving policy of economic reorganization. The other argument is that inherited wealth serves several indirect functions. The desire to provide for children and to found a family is a stimulus to effort. The existence of a leisured class affords possibilities for the free development of originality, and a supply of disinterested men and women for the service of the State. I would suggest once again that the only real test to which the value of these arguments can be submitted ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... to the term "working-class" in the Bill. It would encourage the Socialistic fallacy that the people of England were divided into two classes—the leisured class and the working class; whereas everybody knew that most of the "leisured class" had no leisure and many of the "working-class" did ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... expensively simple, a charming shingled spire. Mr. Beebe's house was near the church. In height it scarcely exceeded the cottages. Some great mansions were at hand, but they were hidden in the trees. The scene suggested a Swiss Alp rather than the shrine and centre of a leisured world, and was marred only by two ugly little villas—the villas that had competed with Cecil's engagement, having been acquired by Sir Harry Otway the very afternoon that Lucy had ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... of small tables, however, is a task that calls for plenty of time, a leisured pursuit; and neither George nor Ashe, a third party having been added to their little affair, felt a desire to stay on and do the thing properly. Ashe was strongly opposed to being discovered and called on to account for his presence there at that hour; and George, conscious ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... by being without a leisured class; it narrows their horizon, but saves them from a vast deal of hysterical nonsense, social mischief and blatant self-advertising. Though great readers of English newspapers and magazines, and much influenced thereby in their social, ethical, and literary views, their interest in ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... of office routine. She could have had no better instructor than Mr. Simcox, she could have had no better training than the handling, the sorting and the filing of his curious and various correspondence. She had become an efficient and a singularly apt and keen office clerk when, more leisured because she had mastered her duties, she might first have had time for realisation that Lombard Street was not here nor all the romance and mystery with which she had invested the power of countinghouses within a thousand miles ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... day or so when I wondered how on earth I was going to snatch the necessary time to combine kidnapping with my other duties. Of all the learned professions it seemed to me that that of the kidnapper most urgently demanded certain intervals for leisured thought, in which schemes and plots ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... of the leisured classes this sense only awakens late in life. He is educated to consider only himself, to regard himself as, in the Broadway phrase, a serious proposition; and some time must pass before he discovers, with a pained surprise, that there are other people in the world, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... which they now talked overlooked the neighboring Temple house, a dignified sentry at the point where the leisured street forsook the chaffer of the town to climb amidst arching elms and maples, above whose gaudy autumn masses rose the dome of the courthouse and the spires of many churches. It was an old-fashioned Georgian structure with white columns ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... shadow upon the outlook of European civilisation at the present time is not the war; it is the failure of any co-operative spirit between labour and the directing classes. The educated and leisured classes have been rotten with individualism for a century; they have destroyed the confidence of the worker in any leadership whatever. Labour stands apart, intractable. If there is to be any such rapid conversion of the economic ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... For no man should be so addicted to leisure as for its sake to neglect his neighbour's profit; neither should any man be so devoted to the active life as to forget the thought of God. For in our leisured life we are not to find delight in mere idle repose, but the seeking and finding of the truth must be our aim; each must strive to advance in that, to hold fast what he finds, and yet not to grudge it to his neighbour. Similarly, in ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... families with joy and pride. These young people knew to a nicety the proper diet and clothing which would best contribute toward endurance. Everything was very fine about them save their motive power. The writer does not refer to the hard-worked men and women who were taking a vacation, but to the leisured young people, to whom this period was the most serious of the year, and filled with the most strenuous exertion. They did not, of course, thoroughly enjoy it, for we are too complicated to be content with mere exercise. Civilization has bound us too closely ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... able to enjoy outside amusements, the old people, necessarily confined to the chimney-corner and many unable to read much for themselves, might return to the joy of their childhood by hearing some of the old stories told them in dramatic form. Here is a delightful occupation for those of the leisured class who have the gift, and a much more ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... scientific. Children's minds are constantly being investigated, and the results given to the public. Mr. Galton has to some extent popularised this sort of investigation. But it is still generally unpopular. Novelists, and artists, leisured people, women, everyone could be of use, if they would investigate themselves, or offer their minds for investigation. But after all that the scientific French, German, American, Italian, and English workers have done, we are as yet only on the threshold of mind knowledge—of what we might know—if ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... living must be as simple as possible, since the neighbours would be more likely to confide their troubles to the ear of one who was, apparently, in the same position of life as themselves. Smart clothing would be unnecessary also, and a hundred and one luxuries of a leisured life. I mentally drew up a list of things taboo, and regarded it with—let me be honest—lingering regret. I was quite, quite willing to deny myself, but it is folly to pretend that it didn't cost a pang. I like good clothes and dainty meals, and motor-cars, and space, and luxury, and people ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... languid puffs of his cigarette, and said, in a tearful drawl: "My dear Drake, of course it is exactly as you say. Who doesn't know it is so? It has always been so and always will be. But what refuge is there for the poor leisured people but these diversions which you despise? And as for the poor titled classes—well, they manage to make their play their business sometimes, don't you know. Confess that they ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... leisured upper ranges of thought and emotion, and in the extraordinary complexity of human life which arose, first, out of the more intimate admixture of all classes in our society; and secondly, out of the wider and more varied world-life ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... aperitif, and he took it, as George admitted, in style. The man-servant, superbly indifferent to refusals, marched processionally off with the loaded tray. The great principle of conspicuous ritualistic waste had been illustrated in a manner to satisfy the most exacting standard of the leisured class; and incidentally a subject ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... us find there's a bit too much.' I'd been up since five that morning myself; and his own work, which was scouring milk- cans for twelve hours a day, didn't strike me as suggesting a life of leisured ease. ...
— The Observations of Henry • Jerome K. Jerome
... her. He had gone suddenly very still—his gaze riveted on Aruna. The Indian dress, the carriage of her veiled head, the leisured grace, so sharply smote him that tears pricked his eyelids; and, for one intoxicating moment he was wafted, in spirit, across the chasm of the War to that dear dream-world of youth, when all distances were blue and all the near prospect bright with the dew of the morning. Only under a mask-like ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Jeffreys. "A few trees and a muddy river make up his world. A winter in London will open his eyes and give him a broader view of life; then he will behave in a more leisured manner." ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... gentry removed to the back country of North Carolina in the fertile region ranging from Williamsborough on the east to Hillsborough on the west. There soon arose in this section of the colony a society marked by intellectual distinction, social graces, and the leisured dignity of the landlord and the large planter. So conspicuous for means, intellect, culture, and refinement were the people of this group, having "abundance of wealth and leisure for enjoyment," that Governor Josiah Martin, in passing through this region some years later, significantly observes: ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... can afford only a single room, the strain is intolerable: violent quarrelling is the result. Very few couples can live in a single-roomed tenement without exchanging blows quite frequently. In the leisured classes there is often no real family life at all. The boys are at a public school; the girls are in the schoolroom in charge of a governess; the husband is at his club or in a set which is not his wife's; and the institution of marriage enjoys the credit of a domestic peace ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw |
