Encourage innocent amusement. [ Addison ]

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Cards were at first for benefits designed,
Sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind. [ Garrick ]

Amusement, to an observing mind, is study. [ Beaconsfield ]

There is no such sport as sport by sport overthrown. [ William Shakespeare ]

Men must read for amusement as well as for knowledge. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game. [ Lamb ]

The real character of a man is found out by his amusements. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]

Pastime passing excellent, if it be husbanded with modesty. [ William Shakespeare ]

I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice. [ Samuel Johnson ]

One must be serious about something if one wants to have any amusement in life. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

The mind ought sometimes to be amused, that it may the better return to thought, and to itself. [ Phaedrus ]

Love is the occupation of the idle man, the amusement of a busy one, and the shipwreck of a sovereign. [ Napoleon I ]

People should be guarded against temptation to unlawful pleasures by furnishing them means of innocent ones. [ Channing ]

Weak minds may be injured by novel-reading; but sensible people find both amusement and instruction therein. [ Beecher ]

Any pleasure which takes and keeps the heart from God is sinful, and unless forsaken, will be fatal to the soul. [ Richard Fuller ]

Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard. [ Hazlitt ]

Those who place their affections at first on trifles for amusement, will find these trifles become at last their most serious concerns. [ Goldsmith ]

Seamen have a custom when they meet a whale to fling out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship. [ Swift ]

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it. [ Johnson ]

My notions about life are much the same as they are about travelling; there is a good deal of amusement on the road, but, after all, one wants to be at rest. [ Southey ]

Those who are too idle to read, save for the purpose of amusement, may in these works acquire some acquaintance with history, which, however inaccurate, is better than none. [ Sir Walter Scott ]

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether. [ Coleridge ]

The reading of romances will always be the favorite amusement of women: old, they peruse them to recall what they have experienced; young to anticipate what they wish to experience. [ A. Ricard ]

Flowers of rhetoric, in sermons or serious discourses, are like the red and blue flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap the profit. [ Swift ]

Fiction is no longer a mere amusement; but transcendent genius, accommodating itself to the character of the age, has seized upon this province of literature, and turned fiction from a toy into a mighty engine. [ Channing ]

What real good does an addition to a fortune, already sufficient, procure? Not any. Could the great man, by having his fortune increased, increase also his appetites, then precedence might be attended with real amusement. [ Goldsmith ]

Though no participator in the joys of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures, in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practice toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation. [ Goldsmith ]