Quotes about Activity

A young student reflecting on his own experience wrote recently: When loneliness is haunting me with its possibility of being a threshold instead of a dead end, a new creation instead of a grave, a meeting place instead of an abyss, then time loses its desperate clutch on me. Then I no longer have to live in a frenzy of activity, overwhelmed and afraid for the missed opportunity.

Some are 'industrious' and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say.

They who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses.

Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity- the activity of flies about a molasses- hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.

I do the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle every morning to keep the old grey matter ticking.

If one could run without getting tired I don't think one would often want to do anything else.

... life, by definition, is never still.

We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity.

Life though a short, is a working day. Activity may lead to evil; but inactivity cannot be led to good.

Without constant activity, the threats of life will soon overwhelm the values.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence.