"Leisured" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aloof even from those purely economic and intellectual movements which tend to make a living united Ireland out of chaos. The national loss is heavy; the waste of talent and of driving-power, for Ireland needs driving-power from her leisured and cultured classes, is ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... it's awful. They'll never understand. They don't realize the deadly grind. They see me moving in scenes of leisured splendour." ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... 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 opportunity in indulging ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of Great Britain finds some better function for this phenomenon, we recommend that he be made the official economic investigator of the Empire. Up to the present this has been a pastime for leisured travellers like Lord Southesk, Sir Charles Dilke, and Rider Haggard. A man with Beaverbrook's ability to analyze economic conditions and gain the confidence of men in high positions could be of incalculable value in getting a thorough survey of the commercial ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... broken down in any way. It is the same great hive of industrialism. Everyone is employed. More are employed than before. The leisured class is smaller. All the workshops and factories and offices are full. The shops display as many wares. There is evidence of an enormous overflowing productivity. Cheap lines of goods are run out in hawkers' barrows and auctioned on the pavement, measures of cloth for suits, overcoats, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... bring England to would be the necessity of returning to barbarism and importing slaves—then their schemes applied to the present inhabitants of the country might all work. The denizens in the casual wards, having a vote and a competence provided by the State, would have time to become of the leisured classes and apply themselves to culture, and so every free citizen being equal, a company of philosophers and an aristocracy of intellect would arise ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... encountered this reviewer in London. 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 ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... 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
... undue excess; for the great days of Athens were those when she was still under the influence of her aristocracy, and when the popular zeal evoked by her free institutions was directed by members of the leisured and cultivated class. The most glorious age of Athenian history closes with the death of Pericles; and Pericles was a man of noble family, freely chosen, year after year, by virtue of his personal qualities, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... guess that, with a slight magnification to make the object plainer, there are three soldiers to each worker in North Africa. On from Oran the gaudy fellow in uniform has been very conspicuous, the most leisured and prosperous of the inhabitants, and one came unwillingly to the conclusion that it is more profitable to smoke cigarettes in a country than to grow corn in it. As for Tripoli, its uniformed protectors hide the protected; but perhaps its natives have learned how to live by killing one ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... 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 ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... drew in deep breaths of it, pondering the parterres of Kaiserskroon and Duchesse de Parme—bold scarlet splashed with yellow—of golden Chrysoloras, of rosy white Cottage Maids. Unknowing it, he had a sense of beauty, and he decided that horticulture, for a leisured man, ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... long, cheerful room, lined with books, and the furniture was solid and shabby with long service. There was an indefinite atmosphere of peace and repose about it, of leisured days haunted by no grey thoughts, very typical of the owner. The window stood open, though a fire burned clearly on the plain brick hearth, beneath ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... himself? All this fiddling donkey-work with which women occupied themselves at home—he dismissed it. Always, when he returned, by the dining-room fire, in an easy chair and a decent frock, sat Marie, sweet and leisured. It was evident that her household duties ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... the big world, things were going on with frantic hurry and change, but in here the leisured calm was huge, gigantic, so much so that the other dwindled into a kind of lost remoteness. "Smothered by depth and distance," he could almost forget it altogether. Out there nations were at war, republics fighting, empires tottering ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... said, "Oh, really! How very interesting!" and looked about as uninterested the while as a human creature could be. In the pause which followed it was obvious that she was readjusting the first impression of a young gentlewoman belonging to her own leisured class, and preparing herself to cross-question an entirely different person—an ordinary teacher in a High School! There was a touch of patronage in her manner, but it was still quite agreeable Mrs Fanshawe was always agreeable for choice: she found it the best policy, and her indolent ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... before leaving Japan I have now been able in the course of a leisured year in England to overhaul and to supplement by up-to-date statistics in an extensive Appendix. In the changed circumstances in which the book is completed I have also ruthlessly transferred to this Appendix all the technical ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... her actions according to their views. She belonged to the large army of women who have to spend so much of their time on office chairs that their comparatively few hours of pleasure have no room for the ordinary conventions that hem round the leisured, home-walled maiden. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... slowly as it did with her; if he had as much faith in her courage as she had in his return. She knew he would come back, and she had trained herself to patience: indeed, it was no hard matter, for hers had always been a world in which there was no haste. The seasons had their leisured way; the people moved with heavy feet; the moor lay in its wisdom, suffering decay and growth. Even the Brent Farm cattle made bright but stationary patches in the field before the house, and as she drew nearer she came upon John and Lily leaning on a ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... 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 ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... forms and deeply rooted customs. China is moving, and, we of the old school think, too quickly. She is going at a bound from the dim light of the bean-oil brazier to the dazzling brilliance of the electric light; from the leisured slowness of the wheelbarrow pushed by the patient coolie to the speed of the modern motor-car; from the practice of the seller of herbs to the science of the modern doctor. We all feel that new China is at a great turning-point because she is just starting out on her journey that may last many ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... made 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 do sometimes, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... amount of scientific and theoretical leadership. This is in accordance with the dictates of caste, inherited from Spain. The upper class have always had Indians to wait upon them, and a Quixotic tendency to the despising of manual labour has naturally resulted, as among the leisured class of any other country. Any occupation that cannot be performed in the habiliments of the frock-coat and silk hat seems derogatory to the Spanish-American, and, filtering down through all the strata of society above the peones this sentiment has the effect ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... existence which Mr. James scarcely touches, the peasant life, the industrial life, the small-trading life, the political life; though it is clear that he divined them all, enough, at least, for his purposes. But in his vast, indeterminate range of busy or leisured folk, men and women with breeding and without it, backed with ancestors or merely the active "sons of their works," young girls and youths and children, he is a master indeed, and there is scarcely ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Leisured churchgoers should choose a service at Crowhurst at sunset: September drives the sun at the right angle to light its dark oak and the great beams of the belfry. Many churches have windows built high in the west end, through which part of the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... a City restaurant reports that one "Food Hog" had for luncheon "half-a-dozen oysters, three slices of roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, two vegetables and a roll." The after-luncheon roll is of course the busy City man's substitute for the leisured club-man's after-luncheon nap. ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... wire, carrying war clubs and bright spears. They followed, with eyes and mouths open, a very sophisticated-looking city cousin in the usual white garments, swinging a jaunty, light bamboo cane. The cane seems to be a distinguishing mark of the leisured class. It not only means that you are not working, but also that you have no ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... it's very simple, only it wants understanding. Our professional and leisured classes still think themselves a cut above our business classes, except of course the very rich. It may be stupid, but there it is, you see. It isn't advisable in England to let people know that you ran a restaurant or kept ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... their domestic relations. When the pair is so poor that it 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 which ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 is the empirical ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse |
