leisure (n.)
leisure (adv.)
Dionysius the Elder, being asked whether he was at leisure, he replied, "God forbid that it should ever befall me!"
Duke. And what's her history?
Vio. A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure;
Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.
And add to these retired Leisure,
That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.
"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.
Epaminondas is reported wittily to have said of a good man that died about the time of the battle of Leuctra, "How came he to have so much leisure as to die, when there was so much stirring?"
Who wooed in haste, and means to wed at leisure.
