“I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.”

— Salvador Dalí,
Diary of a Genius (II. May 2, 1953)

“The heaviest tax is the tax of homage. The more competition prevails, the more we buy from the unknown and work for the unknown, the lower does this tax become, whereas it is really the standard for the loftiness of man's spiritual intercourse.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human (Part II) (§2. 283)

“In our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.”

— Josef Pieper,
Leisure: The Basis of Culture

“The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.”

— Eric Hoffer,
The Passionate State of Mind

"There is no wisdom without leisure."

Ancient Jewish proverb

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

— Stephen Hawking, Science AMA Series

“But, although the individual is not man, man is yet present in the individual, and, like every spook and everything divine, has its existence in him. Hence political liberalism awards to the individual everything that pertains to him as ‘a man by birth’, as a born man, among which there are counted liberty of conscience, the possession of goods – in short, the ‘rights of man’; socialism grants to the individual what pertains to him as an active man, as a ‘laboring’ man; finally, humane liberalism gives the individual what he has as ‘a man’, that is, everything that belongs to humanity. Accordingly the single one [Einzige] has nothing at all, humanity everything; and the necessity of the ‘regeneration’ preached in Christianity is demanded unambiguously and in the completest measure. Become a new creature, become ‘man’!”

[…]

“But is my work then really, as the communists suppose, my sole competence? Or does not this consist rather in everything that I am competent for? And does not the workers' society itself have to concede this, in supporting also the sick, children, old people – in short, those who are incapable of work? These are still competent for a good deal, for instance, to preserve their life instead of taking it. If they are competent to cause you to desire their continued existence, they have a power over you. To him who exercised utterly no power over you, you would vouchsafe nothing; he might perish.”


— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. … Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.”

— Max Horkheimer, The End of Reason

“Has it been observed to what extent outward idleness, or semi-idleness, is necessary to a real religious life (alike for its favorite microscopic labor of self-examination, and for its soft placidity called ‘prayer,’ the state of perpetual readiness for the ‘coming of God’), I mean the idleness with a good conscience, the idleness of olden times and of blood, to which the aristocratic sentiment that work is dishonoring – that it vulgarizes body and soul – is not quite unfamiliar? And that consequently the modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited, foolishly proud industriousness [Arbeitsamkeit] educates and prepares for ‘unbelief’ more than anything else?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (58)

“Work. The word has a stink of executions and of slow agony. It’s the coat of mud and pus that soils the hidden side of the gold coins: the decimated slaves, the flayed serfs, the proletarians sliced in two by fatigue, fear, and the oppression of the passing days, life broken into pieces by the wage. The truest monuments to its efficient glory are the glassed in balconies looking out over gates saying “Arbeit macht frei”, a message that expresses the quintessence of commodity civilization: work will free you... from life.”

― Raoul Vaneigem,
Address to the Living (chapter 2)

“What destroys a person more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure – as a mere automaton of ‘duty’? That is the recipe for décadence, and no less for idiocy.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (11)

„Faulheit ist die Mutter aller Erfindungen.“

“Laziness is the mother of all inventions.”

— Curt Goetz

1. „Faulheit ist die Triebfeder des Fortschritts.“

“Laziness is the driver of progress.”

“Laziness is the driving force of progress.”


2. „Faulheit ist die Mutter des Fortschritts.“

“Laziness is the mother of progress.”


3. „Faulheit denkt scharf.“

“Laziness thinks sharp(ly).”


Deutsche Sprichwörter (German proverbs)

“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

— Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“God loves an idle rainbow,
No less than laboring seas.”

— Ralph Hodgson, Three Poems (II)

“But not enough has been thought about idleness. It is the foundation of all happiness and the end of all philosophy. … Man lies down much too little. He stands and sits about all the time. It’s not good for animal comfort. Only when a man lies down is he quite at peace with himself.”

— Erich Maria Remarque,
Three Comrades (chapter 15)

“On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.”

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living