To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.
Interpretation
Rushing through leisure activities is counterproductive and unwise.
Chesterton highlights the importance of leisure in life and argues that to rush through it is a misguided approach. Leisure should be savored and appreciated as it contributes to overall well-being and reflection, contrasting with a purely business-minded mentality that prioritizes productivity over enjoyment.
In practice
During a speech on work-life balance, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of taking time for leisure.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
If you don't have a moral question governing your society, then you don't have a society that is going to survive.
For before this I was born once a boy, and a maiden, and a plant, and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.
He's got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he's got pretty hands.
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