Busies Quotes & Sayings

I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things. — Edgar Allan Poe

Keeping this journal causes tension as much as it calms it. The writing busies my hands and occupies my mind, but there's something about the pen scratching against the thick textured paper that makes my words take on an uncomfortable weight. Online, words flow almost as quickly as thoughts without revision or purpose, the way they do when you're alone or with someone who's fallen in love with you. — Wayne Gladstone

It was not said amiss by Antisthenes, when people told him that one Ismenias was an excellent piper, "It may be so," said he, "but he is but a wretched human being, otherwise he would not have been an excellent piper." And king Philip, to the same purpose, told his son Alexander, who once at a merry-meeting played a piece of music charmingly and skilfully, "Are you not ashamed, son, to play so well?" For it is enough for a king or prince to find leisure sometimes to hear others sing, and he does the muses quite honor enough when he pleases to be but present, while others engage in such exercises and trials of skill. He who busies himself in mean occupations produces, in the very pains he takes about things of little or no use, an evidence against himself of his negligence and indisposition to what is really good. — Plutarch

The frenzy with which much of the church busies herself with things peripheral to the kingdom in a frantic attempt by her own ingenuity and effort to make God's name holy or make his kingdom come is a sign that something is radically wrong. The church has lost connection with Christ, her living head; she has listened to the siren calls of this world; she has succumbed to the prevailing culture instead of what Christ Jesus created her to be. — Harold L. Senkbeil

No teachers (including Jesus) in the New Testament ever promise material wealth as a reward for obedience. — David Platt

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs. — Gene Wolfe

It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. — William Dean Howells

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one. — Larry Kramer

I came from a real tough neighborhood. Once a guy pulled a knife on me. I knew he wasn't a professional, the knife had butter on it. — Rodney Dangerfield

He who busies himself with things other than improvement of his own self becomes perplexed in darkness and entangled in ruin. His evil spirits immerse him deep in vices and make his bad actions seem handsome. — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity. — Charles Horton Cooley

If one busies himself with an outer display of scriptural wealth, what time is left for silent inward diving after the priceless pearls?" Sri — Paramahansa Yogananda

He who busies himself with the sins of others, or judges his brother on suspicion, has not yet even begun to repent or to examine himself so as to discover his own sins ... — St. Maximos The Confessor

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words. — Samuel Johnson

I feel like there's no subject that can't be sung about. I wrote a song dedicated to people with inflammatory bowel disease, and then I wrote about shoes. And mangoes. Every rock should be turned. — Casey Abrams

Tom Cruise, the church's most coveted, celebrated, and protected celebrity member, and David Miscavige, the tyrannical leader and current head of the church. Ironically, for me and for most other people who have left the church and spoken out against it, the very qualities that we've been penalized for - defying, questioning, thinking independently - are the same qualities that made us prime candidates for Scientology in the first place. — Leah Remini

Understand however that every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself. — Marcus Aurelius

Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for. I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy. — Joseph O'Neill

Have I cheated death again? Hades must be allergic to me. — Amanda Bouchet

Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life you can. — Alice Schroeder

I believe the happiest moments of your life are yet to come. — Brian Tracy

If I do I will secure for you ringside seats." Remus busies himself with looking busy. "Perhaps your future lies in the fine art of divination."
"Now that," Sirius says, "is a flat-out ridiculous waste of time."
"You're only saying that," Remus replies vaguely, "because you only ever see drapery in your crystal ball."
"The professor says they're veils," Sirius mutters. "There's no need to bring that rubbish up again, now is there. — Jaida Jones

Having no business of his own to attend to, he busies himself with the affairs of others. — Horace

Every man is worth just so much as the things about which he busies himself. — Marcus Aurelius

In endeavor itself there is a certain dynamic entertainment, affording an illusion of useful purpose. With achievement the illusion is dispelled. Man's greatest accomplishment is to produce change. The only good in life is study, because study is an endeavor that never reaches fulfillment. It busies a man to the end of his days, and it aims at the only true reality in all this world of shams and deceits. — Rafael Sabatini

It stops wandering about the world of sense and settles down in the world of intellect, and there it occupies itself, casting off falsehood and feeding the soul in what Plato calls 'the plain of truth,' using his method of division to distinguish the Forms, and to determine the essential nature of each thing, and to find the primary kinds, and weaving together by the intellect all that issues from these primary kinds, till it has traversed the whole intelligible world; then it resolves again the structure of that world into its parts, and comes back to its starting-point; and then, keeping quiet (for it is quiet in so far as it is present There) it busies itself no more, but contemplates, having arrived at unity. (Ennead I.3.4) — A.H. Armstrong

Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn't he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man's land, between logical alternatives. I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists. — Robert Coover

I want to stay there. I don't want to go any further. I want to stay. I can't remember who it was - one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein - who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy. — Sofia Samatar

Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is - a purely egoistic cause. — Max Stirner

As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak economy, or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. An antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with - about 225 years old - has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia - politics as theater - and very little substance, compromise, and action. A "can-do" country is now saddled with a "do-nothing" political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving. By every measure - the growth of special interests, lobbies, pork-barrel spending - the political process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three decades. — Fareed Zakaria

Now, though, I must rent a movie."
"You're going to do that?"
"Of course. I'm a werewolf, not a cretin. We have Blockbuster cards."
It blew my mind. Werewolfs rented DVDs. At my local Blockbuster. — Shannon Delany