Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Surely, anyway, a working day of eight or nine hours which is not split by a nap is simply too much for a human being to take, day in, day out, and particularly so in hot weather. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Weather
Nap
Human
Related Quotes:
" My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Games
Run
Table
" Both on an individual and a national scale, debt imprisons. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Scale
Individual
Both
" If we are to make life into a pleasure rather than a struggle, then I would suggest that we have to start with our own mental attitudes. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Struggle
Life
Own
" One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms? "
Tom Hodgkinson
Life
Why
People
" Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Pay
People
Work
" Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Peace
Creative
Saying
" Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We're reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Enough
Birds
Winter
" Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own, I hate them with a passion. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Hate
Own
Passion
" Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work? "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Enjoy
Doing
" All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Our
Happy
Technology
" Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Life
Yourself
Best
" I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Gate
Day
I Am
" What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Economic
World
Work
" The reason laziness is rarely pushed as a lifestyle option is down to one simple reason: money. There are fortunes to be made out of active lifestyles. Gyms charge fees. But no one is going to make money out of sleep. It is free. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Free
Laziness
Money
" We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Doing
Silent
Technology
" We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Work
Result
Shoes
" I originally welcomed the mobile phone, as it seemed to me that it would enable you to work from anywhere. On the mobile, who was to know if you were sitting on the branch of a tree or sitting in an office? But it instead had the opposite effect: instead of freeing us from the office, it allowed the office to take away our freedom. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Me
Work
Tree
" We can live frugally. The less you work, the less you spend and the more time you have for loafing about. But when I put forward this simple notion, I was greeted with a volley of resentment. "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Forward
Live
" It's pretty obvious that Western lifestyles which rely on gigantic amounts of electricity use up far more resources than a subsistence-based life. A little more poverty would be a good thing. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Good
Life
Poverty
" Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden. "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Window
Stand
" Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers' happiness - or what management types refer to as 'employee satisfaction results' - might improve. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Find
Happiness
Power
" I've often said that far more sensible than a 'make poverty history' campaign would be a 'make wealth history' campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the fewer resources you use up. "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Money
History
" In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Age
Want
Simple
" Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Work
Travel
Freedom
" If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Nature
Life
Friends
" One of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you cut the heads off before the flower turns into seeds, the plant will continue to flower. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Flower
Gardening
Magic
" The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the Second World War, and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Pressure
Good
Day
" Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Turn
Boredom
Pleasure
" I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic! "
Tom Hodgkinson
Process
Aspire
Creative
" We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures. "
Tom Hodgkinson
People
Christmas
Dance