It is better to do nothing than to cause harm.
People often refuse innocent amusements with pride, saying that they have no time, that they are busy. And meanwhile, to say nothing of the fact that a good-natured, merry game is more necessary and more important than many tasks, the task which busy people boast about is often something that would be better to never do at all.
While you are working on a task—not a bad one (you should never be working on a bad one), but an indifferent one and even a good one—and when you are indulging in good pleasures, you should remember that there are demands of the soul (the conscience) that are more important than any pleasures and tasks, and that all such tasks must be immediately stopped the moment your conscience calls you to fulfill its demands. And meanwhile, tasks and pleasures have the property of absorbing people to such an extent that good, moral people reply to moral demands: “I don’t have the time, I need to test the oxen I have purchased, I need to bury my dead father.”
We must remember the meaning of the words “let the dead bury the dead.”
Cruel people always try to keep busy so that they can use their busyness to justify their cruelty.
Just as a horse on a wheel cannot but walk, so too a human being cannot do nothing. And therefore there is as much merit in working as there is in breathing; what matters is what a person is working on.
It is a very common error to think that pleasures and amusements are unimportant and even bad (Mohammedanism, Old Orthodoxy, Puritanism). Pleasure is just as important as work; it is the reward for work. Work cannot continue uninterrupted. The necessary rest is naturally adorned with pleasures.
Pleasures are only bad when, firstly, they require the labor of others (for the preparation of tennis, theater, horse racing, etc.); secondly, when pleasures turn into the bitter struggle of competition, as often happens in games of dexterity; and thirdly, when the pleasures are made available only to a select few. Without this, not only is pleasure not bad, it is actually a good thing, especially for young people.
There is nothing as empty and useless and harmful for the soul as spending your time on the accumulation of property, yet there is no other activity that attracts people as much as this, and to which people ascribe so much importance.
Work and pleasure, correctly taking turns, make life joyful. But not every kind of work and not every kind of pleasure.
