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It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.

Tom Hodgkinson

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Shelf
Shelves
Degree
Putting
Degrees
Soon
Difficult
Without

More quotes by Tom Hodgkinson

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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
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Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.
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Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?
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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
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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
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Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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
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Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience.
Tom Hodgkinson
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We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves
Tom Hodgkinson
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I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Life is about recapturing lost freedoms.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.
Tom Hodgkinson
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The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.
Tom Hodgkinson
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We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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
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Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers' happiness - or what management types refer to as employee satisfaction results - might improve.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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
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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