Leisure has often been defined as a quality of experience or as free time. Free time is time spent away from business, work, job hunting, domestic chores, and education, as well as necessary activities such as eating and sleeping. From a research perspective, this approach has the advantages of being quantifiable and comparable over time and place.
Leisure is pain; take off our chariot wheels, How heavily we drag the load of life! Blest leisure is our curse; like that of Cain, It makes us wander, wander earth around To fly that tyrant, thought.
Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 125.
What, then, shall we do? someone may ask. What else, indeed, than devote ourselves to the care of our souls, keeping all our leisure free from other things.
Basil of Caesarea, On Greek Literature, Loeb Classical Library, Volume 270, p. 415
Knowledge is the product of leisure. The members of a very primitive society have no time to amass knowledge; their days are fully occupied with the provision of the bare necessities of life. But as soon as a community begins to accumulate wealth, and so becomes able to support a leisured class (priests, instructors of rich men's children), an opportunity is created for those who desire knowledge to devote their lives to its acquirement. Out of this 'curiosity to know' science is born.
Edward Bradford Titchener, An Outline of Psychology (1916), p. 1.