179 Quotes by Tom Hodgkinson

I’ve never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don’t understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday.

In a world where you are constantly asked to be ‘committed,’ it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.

It’s senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are .

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.

We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives!

Being safe is fiction.

Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don’t work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it’s easier to start doing what you want to do.

What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest.