Hobby Essay Quotes

The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.

Play itself is a primary process, not a luxury, not a hobby, but something all children must do to survive into adulthood.

I wish this were the kind if things kids learned early on. Gender doesn't determine the things you like, your hobbies, or your personality.

Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life goes with it.

[E]very community insists on what Professor G. J. Renier calls "the Story that must be told" about its own past, and where scholarship decays, myth will crowd in.

Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry - lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an 'exercise' undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty.

If Mr. Hauser finds that he is concerned with entities in history which constantly elude his grasp, if he finds that the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, rationalism and subjectivism constantly seem to change places in his field of vision, he should ask himself whether he is looking through a telescope or a kaleidoscope.

Some writers, even some poets, become famous public figures, but writers as such have no social status, in the way that doctors and lawyers, whether famous or obscure, have. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the so-called fine arts have lost the social utility they once had. Since the invention of printing and the spread of literacy, verse no longer has a utility value as a mnemonic, a devise by which knowledge and culture were handed on from one generation to the next, and, since the invention of the camera, the draughtsman and painter are no longer needed to provide visual documentation; they have, consequently, become “pure” arts, that is to say, gratuitous activities. Secondly, in a society governed by the values appropriate to Labor (capitalist America may well be more completely governed by these than communist Russia) the gratuitous is no longer regarded – most earlier cultures thought differently – as sacred, because, to Man the Laborer, leisure is not sacred but a respite from laboring, a time for relaxation and the pleasures of consumption. In so far such a society thinks about the gratuitous at all, it is suspicious of it – artists do not labor, therefore, they are probably parasitic idlers – or, at best, regards it as trivial – to write poetry or paint pictures is a harmless private hobby.

Papa, explique-moi donc à quoi sert l'histoire?' These are the opening words of Marc Bloch's moving Apologie pour l'histoire, which was cut short when its author was killed by the Nazis. [...]Apparently it has not yet struck anyone that where the myth originated it might also be rendered innocuous through more accurate work in the quarry of books. [...] It would be easy to show that one element of the nazi myth sprang up in the harmless field of comparative philology. The great Max Müller once ventured the guess that all peoples speaking the so-called Indo-Germanic languages might derive from the tribe of Aryans. He soon changed his mind, but the mischief was done, and the ghastly tragedy of those who were idiotically labelled non-Aryans should now suffice to answer the question of Marc Bloch's son.

Clearly, material objects as well as human beings, societies, or periods may be subject to conflicting pulls, they may contain tensions and divisions, but they can no more "harbor contradictions" than they can harbor syllogisms. The reason why Marxist critics so often forget this simple fact is that they are mostly concerned with the analysis of political systems. It may be true or not that "Capitalism" — if there is such a thing — contains "inner contradictions," if we take capitalism to be asystem of propositions. But to equate the conflicts within capitalist society with its "contradictions" is to pun without knowing it. It is where the politicians turns historian that this confusion becomes disastrous. For it prevents him from ever testing or discarding any hypothesis. If he finds it confirmed by some evidence he is happy; if other evidence seems to conflict he is even happier, for he can then introduce the refinement of "contradictions".

Whatever the historian’s individual outlook may be, a subject such as the social history of art simply cannot be treated by relying on secondary authorities. Even Mr. Hauser’s belief in social determinism could have become fertile and valuable if it had inspired him, as it has inspired others, to prove its fruitfulness is research, to bring to the surface new facts about the past not previously caught in the nest of more conventional theories. Perhaps the trouble lies in the fact that Mr. Hauser is avowedly not interested in the past for its own sake but that he sees it as "the purpose of historical research" to understand the present (p. 714). His theoretical prejudices may have thwarted his sympathies. For to some extent they deny the very existence of what we call the "humanities". If all human beings, including ourselves, are completely conditioned by the economic and social circumstances of their existence then we really cannot understand the past by ordinary sympathy.

McSweeny’s Internet Tendency,” a web-based collection of humor pieces from various authors.

hunting is considered not just a hobby or sport but an art, a ritual, one that some even consider holy: a way to participate in the cycle of life that God created, a way to stay connected to the earth and those who came before, to live in communion with the land.

Sanditon was a second wife and four children to him -- hardly less dear --- and certainly more engrossing.--- He could talk of it for ever. --- It had indeed the highest claims; --- not only those of birth place, property, and home, --- it was mine, his lottery, his speculation and his hobby horse; his occupation, his hope and his futurity.--- Sanditon, Jane Austen

According to Robert Menzies, Morrison deserves the social and economic advantages provided by geography, education and nepotism: "To say the industrious and intelligent son of self-sacrificing and saving and forward-looking parents has the same social deserts and even material needs as the dull offspring of stupid and improvident parents is absurd." The short shrift: eat shit, serfs! This moral justification for poverty is a central pillar of Morrison's political beliefs and and Pentecostalism. The problem is that it deeply contradicts Australia's self-mythology about being a bastion of the fair go. So Scott John Morrison - a tall poppy from the eastern suburbs - needed to reinvent himself as ScoMo, a top bloke from the Sutherland Shire who loves rugby league. In doing so, he plagiarised the nickname and personal hobby of Anthony "Albo" Albanese.

Because being out does not mean that you are invited to dissect our lives to satisfy your own curiosity. Sex workers are not on call for your university assignment. Our bodies are not open slabs for you to project your opinions, voice your concerns, open up and extract information: Certainly this has been the hobby of the medical profession, rescue NGOs, and governments.

Farming is a poor way to make a living, at least around here, because you have to go into factory farming to make it pay. It is the best hobby there is—only 'hobby' is too little a word. The best way of life. Not just because you learn forty different trades, and not just because you follow the seasons, but because you get to spend your whole life producing a single work of art. That is, the farm itself.

We sometimes use a friend to prevent or stop ourselves from feeling abnormal (or crazy) for liking or enjoying something (or some of the things) that we like or enjoy.

maybe my actions had condemned me to an endless afterlife in a middle seat in the last row near the