Top 100 Tom Hodgkinson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

2. “There’s nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

3. “All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

4. “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

5. “The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

6. “Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

7. “Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

8. “Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

9. “I seethe at the humiliation of airport security checks.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

10. “Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they’ve got worse.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

11. “If you want health, wealth and happiness, the first step is to throw away your alarm clocks!”

— Tom Hodgkinson

12. “We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

13. “Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler’s break. Travel should not be hard work.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

17. “In both word and deed, one of the greatest idlers of all time was John Lennon. In his songs we see repeated defences of simply lying around doing nothing.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

18. “Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?”

— Tom Hodgkinson

19. “Behaving as if you are better than others shows a lack of regard for other people.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

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

— Tom Hodgkinson

21. “The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the Second World War, and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

22. “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

23. “Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite – dynamic, purposeful activity – is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

24. “Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

25. “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

26. “Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

27. “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

28. “Computers tend to separate us from each other – Mum’s on the laptop, Dad’s on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

29. “I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

30. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

31. “I suddenly realised, hey, I’m not a lazy idiot, I’m an idler! It’s something to aspire to, it’s part of the creative process! That’s fantastic!”

— Tom Hodgkinson

32. “When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

33. “Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?”

— Tom Hodgkinson

34. “I would like to propose slow cycling. Commute by bike. At a stroke, you remove the need for and absurd cost of public transport. Cycling is almost completely free. There is no longer any need for the gym as you get fit by cycling. And you can go at your own pace.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

35. “Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

36. “Travelling fills me with dread.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

37. “Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

38. “Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

39. “What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, nine-to-five type week, or worse.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

40. “All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

41. “Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

42. “Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

43. “As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

44. “The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won’t give you what you need.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

45. “Meetings, clearly, can take place anywhere, and wouldn’t it be nice to see your coworkers lounging on the grass with their shoes off?”

— Tom Hodgkinson

46. “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

47. “To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

48. “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

49. “I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

50. “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