Quotes & Sayings About Busyness

We won't say no to more craziness until we can say yes to more Jesus. We will keep choosing dinner rolls over the bread of life. We will choose the fanfare of the world over the feet of Jesus. We will choose busyness over blessing. — Kevin DeYoung

Stepping out of the busyness, stopping our endless pursuit of getting somewhere else, is perhaps the most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit. — Tara Brach

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Love is easy early on...its when the busyness of life creeps in and felling ebb and flow that real love shines through in small choices. — Steve Knox

I'm not good with hospitals. The endless buildings, trees dotted around like apologies, and inside, it's job functions you can't understand and that air of incomprehensible busyness. Curtained-off beds and death settling like falling snow. — Harry Bingham

Never confuse activity with productivity. — Rick Warren

If you fear looking at your true self, you'll find many ways to distract yourself from it. Busyness, drama, and addictions are ways of avoiding facing yourself. To find the peace you seek, stop running and just he. Get to know who you really are. Remember the wholeness you felt before you joined the rush to nowhere. Then you'll recognize yourself through the eyes of love, and everything will be different. — Alan Cohen

If you look at a column of ants on the march you will see that there are some who are stragglers or have lost their way. The column has no time for them; it goes on. Sometimes the stragglers die. But even this has no effect on the column. There is a little disturbance around the corpse, which is eventually carried off - and then it appears so light. And all the time the great busyness continues, and that apparent sociability, that rite of meeting and greeting which ants travelling in opposite directions, to and from their nest, perform without fail. So — V.S. Naipaul

From deep in the tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century text from an unnamed English monk: "You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God." The words slap. Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God. But the monk's words console, too. For, of time and person, it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward. That my ways of coming to God these days are all scraps. — Lauren F. Winner

We become so caught up in the busyness of our lives. Were we to step back, however, and take a good look at what we're doing, we may find that we have immersed ourselves in the 'thick of thin things.' In other words, too often we spend most of our time taking care of the things which do not really matter much at all in the grand scheme of things, neglecting those more important causes. — Thomas S. Monson

We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness. — Alan Watts

Disillusionment takes us to the question: what does it profit a man if he gains this world and loses himself? And disillusionment exposes that while we were supposedly serving the kingdom, we somehow became the king, and when we thought we were following Jesus, we inexplicably made him a servant of our dreams. The only real tragedy is the leader who never allows disillusionment to wear him to a nub and expose the godlessness of his busyness. — Dan B. Allender

All of us are partly living our story line the enemy offers us.
Most of us, perhaps, live in not a terribly evil place in the moralistic sense of the word. We simply live where busyness, or apathy, or struggle with circumstances that won't change occupies most of our energy. And the enemy is perfectly happy to leave us in such a place practicing our religion. — John Eldredge

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers. — Gore Vidal

When God brings a time of waiting, and appears to be unresponsive, don't fill it with busyness, just wait. — Oswald Chambers

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. — Mary Oliver

If you are too busy to read, you are too busy. — Richard J. Foster

God cares more about us abiding by His commandments and loving big - feeling deeply alive and free from the traps of perfection and comparison. He's watching us scurry about, saying, "Sweet girls, why are you so hard on yourselves? All this worry and busyness is for what? I've given you all you need. — Emily Ley

Work addiction seems to be an addiction we are proud of. We almost seem to brag with mock displeasure that we are "overwhelmed" with busyness, sometimes as an excuse for not really being able to do what we really want to be doing. Work addiction is a symptom not of working your brains out but of your brain working you out. Why are you doing what you're doing for a career and how do you like doing it? Do you like your answer? — Paul Pearsall

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition. — Josef Pieper

Full minds create chaos. — David W. Jones

Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers- Plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.
Respond to the above quote. Pay special attention to each of your five senses as you describe your surroundings. Also, you need to incorporate at least one metaphor and smile in your descriptions. — Lorraine Anderson

Busyness kills more Christians than bullets. — Kevin DeYoung

The Old Poets Of China
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist. — Mary Oliver

What exactly did people do when they had all the time in the world and could do whatever they liked? (p 153) — Sharon Creech

For lack of love one does a million other things. — Marty Rubin

It's strange how many of us choose to stuff our lives with busyness and distractions. When we're too busy, we don't do anything well. Our relationships suffer, our performance at work suffers, and we don't enjoy our lives. Yet being "crazy busy" is a badge of honor for some people. — Bert Jacobs

What would it be like if, right in the midst of this busyness, we were to consciously take our hands off the controls? What if we were to intentionally stop our mental computations and our rushing around and, for a minute or two, simply pause and notice our inner experience? — Tara Brach

Busyness is not a reason for not getting other things done. It is an excuse for not claiming your true priorities. — Alan Cohen

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it. — Claire Tomalin

The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Speaking honestly and with the benefit of hindsight, I realize that at that point in my life, I was overworking and hopelessly under-spiritual. That wasn't my intention - in fact, I was very earnest in what I was doing and in what I believed. But it was all busyness, frantic activity. I hadn't learned how to be with God, how to breath in His new life. — Andy Freeman

How narrow is the vision that exalts the busyness of the ant above the singing of the grasshopper. — Khalil Gibran

We borrow. We steal. We purchase what we need and buy what we don't. We acquire things, people, places, all in the process of losing ourselves. Busyness is the religion of distraction. I cannot talk to you, because I have too much to do. — Terry Tempest Williams

One of the most convicting things I have recently come to realize about Jesus is that He was never, not once, in a hurry. — Mark Buchanan

How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness. — Nancy Horan

Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do. Sometimes I think we don't want to — Sogyal Rinpoche

Americans are suffering from a busyness epidemic. We're addicted to busy. So many of us try to find fulfillment and self-worth in piling our plates too high. The busier we are, the more important we feel. This is why our culture, by and large, is exhausted, overworked, and overwhelmed. — Crystal Paine

It's amazing how much information is coming at us most of the time through technology, the media and the busyness of the world around us. I've decided that the world probably isn't going to change, so I have to change. I'm learning how to keep my mind on what I'm doing, rather than thinking about several things at once or what I want to do next. — Joyce Meyer

It's easy to put the links between the increases in mental illness, depression, ADHD, and the like, with the speed of the modern world. People never get the chance to do nothing, or when they do, they lack the control to prevent their mind from racing off in a thousand different directions. So much so that their doing nothing becomes a thousand different things and the thousand different things becomes stress, anxiety, worry and fear. Left untreated these simple everyday things become well entrenched in our psyches and start to dominate our lives. We have a chronic addiction with doing and we love to use our busyness as a stamp of our hard work and hectic lives and we get stuck in this busy trap of always doing. — Evan Sutter

I think sometimes - do not we all? - that perhaps the present year is my last year and that all my busyness is foolish. — Marjorie Bowen

Busyness makes us stop caring about the things we care about. — Mark Buchanan

People are very busy; they are so busy that when they walk in the crowds they see no one, no one but themselves; they hear no voice, no voice but their own voice! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Busyness is the unrivaled archenemy of spiritual authenticity. — Bill Hybels

Busyness does not make you money, business do. Are you running a busyness or a business? — Saji Ijiyemi

Juggling and balancing effectively required that we make clear, legacy-driven choices about what we're trying to keep in the air and how we sequence our movements down the beam. Because the ultimate grade in life is not based on how far and fast we've walked the beam or how many things we've juggled - it's based on how much we've enjoyed the exercise. — Eric C. Sinoway

Love is easy early on...it's when feelings ebb and flow and the busyness of life creeps in that real love shines through in small conscious choices. — Steve Knox

Sloth is most often evidenced in busyness ... in frantic running around, trying to be everything to everyone, and then having no time to listen or pray, no time to become the person who is doing these things. — Eugene H. Peterson

Today we live in a world that judges its achievements by speed and busyness. ... We are so busy making things happen that we have little time left to think about the value of what is happening. We urgently need people who concentrate on the meaning of life rather than simply the speed. — Joan D. Chittister

When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this doesn't actually move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business. — Gary Keller

When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week. — Robin McKinley

When I claim more than what I can handle, I limit the opportunities for another person in my community. — Jeff Shinabarger

Only an open mind still has room for new knowledge. What is outgrown and used up must be discarded to make room for what is yet to be learned. And much of the best thinking is done alone-in deserts, on beaches, in bed, behind closed doors. It is why we say we need to get away-to escape from clutter and busyness-to hear ourselves think. — Robert Fulghum

Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. The options are almost limitless for creating "busyness": — Timothy Ferriss

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease. — Margaret Heffernan

Sin does not always drive us to drink; more often it drives us to exhaustion. Tiredness is equally as debilitating as drunkenness. Burnout is slang for an inner tiredness, a fatigue of our souls. Jesus came to forgive us all of our sins, including the sin of busyness. The problem with growth in the modern church is not the slowness of growth but the rushing of growth. — Mike Yaconelli

A person can hurry through or sleep walk through life, but whenever they stop to catch their breath or awaken from a long nap, they will find apprehension, disquiet, and fretfulness waiting their directed attention. — Kilroy J. Oldster

May our eyes focus rightly on Christ ... before the need to please others, before church, and before the busyness of Christian life. Those things will surely have their place, but they will be most valuable if put in their proper position. — Traci LaRussa

I don't want to return to the world outside these Gardens. All I want is to notice the dew on a leaf. The holy busyness of worms in the soil. — Tor Udall

Learning to pray doesn't offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of outer busyness — Paul E. Miller

Caught up in our own busyness, frantically running from one crisis to the next in a cycle that looks less like loving the Messiah and more like trying to become one. — Phileena Heuertz And Darren Prince

As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I've seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans. — Linda Hogan

For many, hectic activity provides a kind of perpetual adrenalin rush. Often those consumed by busyness feel as though this pattern of life and work legitimizes them. They feel important; they feel needed; they feel alive. However, they have a false sense of life and importance, and eventually it leaves them feeling hollow.
It — Gordon T. Smith

Battling busyness is a community response. — Kevin DeYoung

BEFORE A MEETING God of peace, we ask your blessing on our meeting. Help us to set aside our busyness and focus on the task at hand. Give us wisdom, discernment and integrity, boldness to speak and a willingness to listen. Keep us mindful of those our decisions will affect, and may all our deliberations be to your glory. — Jan McFarlane

In a world where news of inhumanity bombards our sensibilities, where grasping for things goes so far beyond our needs, where time is squandered in busyness, it is a pleasure and a privilege to pause for a look at handiwork, to see beauty amidst utility, and to know that craft traditions begun so long ago serve us today. — John Wilson

Busyness is like sin: kill it, or it will be killing you. — Kevin DeYoung

If I turn up the music of busyness, I will miss the whispers of God's call. — Diane Moody

Over the slow pass of winters and summers, Amanda had grown to understand the cycles that made up small-town life. She knew that fewer tourists meant easier work for the staff, but fewer tips for the servers, and less chance of picking up extra hours. A busy summer kept everyone hopping and the tills full, but it also shifted the steady pace of life, tugging it into a frenetic rate. — Danika Stone

Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all. Your will find yourself, and God will find you in new ways. Silence also brings Sabbath to you. It completes solitude, for without it you cannot be alone. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence we come to attend. Lastly, fasting is done that we many consciously experience the direct sustenance of God to our body and our whole person. — Dallas Willard

The nature of creativity is to make space for things to happen ... We can drive it out with our busyness and plans. — Iain McGilchrist

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION How much work did you do today that you will be proud of tomorrow? I don't mean just how you handled the big things, but also how you addressed the little, seemingly insignificant ones. Did you make progress on what matters most to you, or did you allow the buzz, busyness, and expectations of others to squelch your passion and focus? I've been asking these questions of others and myself each day for more than a decade, and they are the main reason I originally felt compelled to write Die Empty. Through my work I've encountered many teams of brilliant, sharp, amazing, talented people who have at some point "settled in" or begun coasting on past success. Unfortunately, — Todd Henry

Busyness chokes deep thinking. — Todd Stocker

Last of terror's stages, Selene had tutored Europa and me, is busyness. — Steven Pressfield

When God seems distant, you may feel that he is angry with you or is disciplining you for some sin. In fact, sin does disconnect us from intimate fellowship with God. We grieve God's Spirit and quench our fellowship with him by disobedience, conflict with others, busyness, friendship with the world, and other sins.10 — Rick Warren

Our state of wellness determines our response to any situation. Never allow the busyness of life to distract you from taking care of your well being. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Life lived amidst tension and busyness needs leisure. Leisure that recreates and renews. Leisure should be a time to think new thoughts, not ponder old ills. — C. Neil Strait

When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another - and ourselves. — Jack Kornfield

Nothing easier than to confuse busyness with goodness. — Mason Cooley

The biggest disease in North America is busyness. — Thomas Merton

Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom. — David Whyte

It's incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy - very busy - without being very effective. — Stephen R. Covey

They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time ... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life ...
God gives us time. And who has time for God?
Which makes no sense. — Ann Voskamp

I thought the doing and the busyness would keep me safe. They keep me numb. Which is not the same as safe, which isn't even the greatest thing to aspire to. If — Shauna Niequist

Technology sometimes encourages people to confuse busyness with effectiveness. — Douglas B. Reeves

Even though in principle we may "know better", we routinely succumb all the same to the incessant, often frantic and unexamined busyness of thinking we have to get somewhere else first before we can rest; thinking we need to get certain things done to feel we have accomplished something before we can be happy. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness. — John C. Maxwell

Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it's the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it's just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let's just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound. — Terry Pratchett

The busier you are, the more intentional you must be. — Michael Hyatt

Joining Jesus doesn't add another layer of busyness on top of an already insane schedule. Instead, joining Jesus results in less stress, more life, more laughter and more fruit than what many of us are currently seeing. — Greg Finke

When busyness goes after joy, it goes after everyone's joy. — Kevin DeYoung

The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long" "How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love" "9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings" Anything about Alan Watts: "Alan Watts has changed my life. I've written about him quite a bit. — Timothy Ferriss

For we must not dwell on Death, as it is a mystery and it is something Unknown we leave to the Lord and his disposing for if we knew everything we would be too full of perfectly known things, and thus never rested nor content but driven with busyness and stuffed full. When I rode out in the early mornings in summertimes everything appeared to me, one after the other, in its own selfe without having to be known about beforehand, before you even get to it. In the order of the world is a deep pattern. You can't know if beforehand. If you did you would remain forever unsurprised and dwarfed and hardened. In the early mornings one after another we broke up the planes of water in the pools of Beaverdam with slow steps, horse and rider, and the trees appeared in their reflections like underwater spirits of themselves. Before these things a person is silent. — Paulette Jiles

His woolly grey hair, short thick body, air of perpetual busyness, suggested an industrious gnome conscripted into the service of the army; a gnome who also liked to practise considerable malice against the race of men with whom he mingled, by making as complicated as possible every transaction they had to execute through himself. — Anthony Powell

Those who suffer suffer because hurt people hurt people, and busy people let it happen. So am I going to be busy or am I going to be brave? — Marquita Burke-DeJesus

Godly saints will always tell you that the inward witness of the Spirit is most clearly heard when you are quiet before him in prayer. It is then that his still, small voice can be most clearly heard. It is not then drowned out by the noisiness and busyness of our lives. — Garry Friesen

When the fire of prayer goes out, the barrenness of busyness takes over. — George Carey

I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters. — Mark Slouka

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man's-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life. — John Buchan

Renunciation of many good things is needed to break our bondage to the fragmenting forces of our society, which most of us have internalized, as if busyness on many fronts were a virtue instead of a vice. — David Janzen