47+ Tom Hodgkinson Quotes On Education, Culture And World

Tom Hodgkinson is a British writer and editor, best known for his book The Idle Parent. He is the founder of The Idler magazine and the Idler Academy, which promotes a philosophy of leisure, self-motivation and self-sufficiency. He is a proponent of the Slow Movement, advocating a return to traditional hobbies and crafts, and a rejection of consumerism and the modern rat race. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Tom Hodgkinson on leadership, education, culture.

Top 10 Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

1. The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.
2. When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens.
3. 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.
4. There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.
5. I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
6. Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience.
7. Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
8. The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there's no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they're asking questions.
9. Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.
10. Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need.

Tom Hodgkinson Short Quotes

• The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.
• Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.
• When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.
• We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves
• It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.

Tom Hodgkinson Quotes About Life

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. — Tom Hodgkinson

Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: "Time is money." He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life. — Tom Hodgkinson

Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in. — Tom Hodgkinson

Life is about recapturing lost freedoms. — Tom Hodgkinson

Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen. — Tom Hodgkinson

A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing. — Tom Hodgkinson

Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it. — Tom Hodgkinson

Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life. — Tom Hodgkinson

...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life. — Tom Hodgkinson

If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends. — Tom Hodgkinson

Tom Hodgkinson Quotes About World

In the West, we have become addicted to work. Americans now work the longest hours in the world. And the result is not health, wealth and wisdom, but rather a lot of anxiety, a lot of ill health and a lot of debt. — Tom Hodgkinson

What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest. You would have thought that the end of all this innovation, technological advancement, and financial wizardry should be to create less work, not more of it. — Tom Hodgkinson

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. — Tom Hodgkinson

Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities. — Tom Hodgkinson

Tom Hodgkinson Famous Quotes And Sayings

Little things like making clothes, baking bread, cooking, even useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home - that sort of time is gone. And the time we have? We're so exhausted, we want to let ourselves get sucked in to the escape world of TV. I'm speaking from experience; I'm not above all this. — Tom Hodgkinson

We have an idea that if something we're doing isn't actually earning money, or spending it, then it's completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level. — Tom Hodgkinson

One of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you cut the heads off before the flower turns into seeds, the plant will continue to flower. — Tom Hodgkinson

Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness. — Tom Hodgkinson

Writing a book is a brilliant thing because once you've finished it, you've done it, and there's the potential for it to go on earning you a living without you doing any more work on it. It's absolutely ideal for an idler. — Tom Hodgkinson

We need to claim lunch back. It is our natural right. It has been stolen from us by our rulers. The fear that keeps you chained to your desk, staring at your screen, does not serve your spirit. Lunch is a time to forget about being sensible, practical, efficient. A proper lunch should be spiritually as well as physically nourishing. Cosy, convivial, a treat; lunch is for loafers. — Tom Hodgkinson

Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that's it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It's a tragically limited idea of what life is all about. — Tom Hodgkinson

What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community. — Tom Hodgkinson

Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure. — Tom Hodgkinson

I've found that there isn't any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out. Most of the Beatles' songs probably originated in about five minutes. — Tom Hodgkinson

I like the idea of becoming [fairly] good at lots of things rather than very good at just one thing. So it would be nice to be okay at the guitar or at the piano, a reasonable cook, perhaps able to fix your car or do some basic carpentry, and be able to write the odd article. Rather than being super good at one tiny thing, to be kind of average at lots of things. It might mean that you have a more kind of enjoyable, complete life. — Tom Hodgkinson

The best thing that can happen to anybody is to be sacked or made redundant because often that's when you think, "I don't want to become one of the living dead. I haven't got anything to lose, now I can start to follow my own dreams." — Tom Hodgkinson

I don't put much faith in the political system because it's a question of how are you going to run capitalism, not how are we going to develop a different system to capitalism. — Tom Hodgkinson

Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount. — Tom Hodgkinson

I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own. — Tom Hodgkinson

Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant and nothing matters. All of man's striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us. — Tom Hodgkinson

We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside. — Tom Hodgkinson

The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness. — Tom Hodgkinson

Life Lessons by Tom Hodgkinson

1. Tom Hodgkinson's work emphasizes the importance of living a simpler life and finding joy in the mundane.
2. He encourages people to take back control of their lives and focus on what is truly important to them, rather than letting society dictate their choices.
3. His philosophy encourages individuals to be mindful of their actions and to strive for a more meaningful life.