There’s no question that free time is a precious commodity – especially for entrepreneurs. After all, there’s always something to be done when your business is your life. But all good flâneurs know the importance of taking a break now and then.
That’s why we’ve gathered some of our favorite free time quotes, perfect for bookmarking and sharing with anyone who needs a little inspiration. Whether you’re catching up on some much-needed sleep or exploring a new city, these quotes will remind you to make the most of every moment on your journey.
Free Time Quotes
I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.
Sojourner Truth
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and , when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver
There is no time to rest until our world achieves wholeness and balance, where all men and women are considered equal and free.
Leymah Gbowee
What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
Nassim Taleb
Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.
Harvey Mackay
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
Louis D. Brandeis
Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.
Socrates
Free from the constraints of language, and harnessing the unique qualities of a single moment frozen in time.
Steve McCurry
Daytime is for sleeping. Nighttime is the best time for making art. The later at night it gets the further into another world you go.
Mark Ryden
Free time keeps me going.
Gus Van Sant
You will be amazed at how much free time you have when you never have to think about money.
Bob Proctor
That if desperate times call for desperate measures, then I’m free to act as desperately as I wish.
Suzanne Collins
Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.
Susan Cain
The real problem of leisure time is how to keep others from using yours.
Arthur Lacey
We try to ‘self-medicate’ ourselves against boredom with mobile phones in any given moment of free time.
Alex Bogusky
Too much free time is certainly a monkey’s paw in disguise. Most people can’t handle a structureless life.
Douglas Coupland
Free time is an illusion. It’s what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight.
Tamora Pierce
Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life.
Guy Debord
The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.
Ruth Reichl
Make use of all free time at the office and elsewhere for chanting your mantra or reading spiritual books. Avoid indulging in unnecessary gossip and try to talk about spiritual subjects with others.
Mata Amritanandamayi
Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level.
Bill McKibben
Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing down enough to remember what made your life worthwhile and happy.
Amy Tan
It’s not a man’s working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.
Marilynne Robinson
Nothing adds to a person’s leisure time like doing things when they are supposed to be done.
Orlando Aloysius Battista
People want more and more leisure time which means the freedom to do what they want to do, not what they have to do, and as we get richer and richer, more and more people will be able to afford that.
Robert Fogel
Take time off to give to yourself, in a sense to fill yourself up to fullness, to where now you can overflow in giving.
John Gray
Leisure time is only leisure time when it is earned; otherwise, leisure time devolves into soul-killing lassitude. There’s a reason so many new retirees, freed from the treadmill of work, promptly keel over on the golf course: Work fulfills us. It keeps us going.
Ben Shapiro
I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies—preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time—had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.
Theodor W. Adorno
It’s a false assumption that people with a lot of money have a lot of free time to shop.
Natalie Massenet
One can find time for everything if one is never in a hurry.
Mikhail Bulgakov
I’m a great reader that never has time to read.
Eudora Welty
I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
In high school she even had time for herself, to draw and read, to write down quotes, to be inside her own head without an agenda.
Kate Fagan
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
He is self-conscious because everyone knows he has wings but they’ve never seen him fly. Now & then there will be a feather in odd places or maybe a footprint to show he was there. All in all, he thinks it’s nobody else’s business what he does with his free time.
Brian Andreas
They call it free time and it’s the biggest lie because we are still here.
Ibi Zoboi
It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.
Hans Selye
It’s not possible to move from one activity to the next at blinding speed and be reflective at the same time. The more complex and demanding the work we do, the wider, deeper and longer the perspective we require to do it well. It’s almost impossible to do that when we create no white space in our lives.
Tony Schwartz
People would have more leisure time if it weren’t for all the leisure-time activities that use it up.
Peg Bracken
If something has to be done, one might as well do it when one has a lot of free time.
Mohammed Hanif
Your success will be in direct proportion to how you spend your ‘free’ time.
Mike Dunlap
A Final Word
Whether you’re a fan of taking things slow or seizing the day, we all need some time to ourselves. It’s not all about dedicating our thoughts and time to work, the past, the future or other people. Sometimes the greatest value lies in the time we dedicate to ourselves, and therefore that time should never be thrown into the shadow of oblivion. These quotes are here to remind you of that.
Don’t forget, flâneurs are not just strollers, travelers, or observers but individuals who are chasing their dreams. And every dreamer needs their me time.
What’s your favorite quote about free time? Leave a comment and let us know!
You might also like these related quote collections:
- Quotes About Slowing Down in Life
- Quotes About Exploration
- Quotes About Idleness
- Quotes Related to Flâneurs and Flânerie
- Quotes About Vacation
Originally Published: August 9, 2022