Quotes About Activity

Quid quid movetur ab alio movetur(nothing moves without having been moved).

To amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously.

Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.

Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness

Happiness is a kind of activity of the soul; whereas the remaining good things are either merely indispensable conditions of happiness, or are of the nature of auxiliary means, and useful instrumentally.

The quality of life is determined by its activities.

Happiness seems to depend on leisure, because we work to have leisure, and wage war to live in peace.

For 'activity in conformity with virtue' involves virtue.

The life of active virtue is essentially pleasant.

existence is to all men a thing to be chosen and loved, and that we exist by virtue of activity (i.e. by living and acting), and that the handiwork is in a sense, the producer in activity; he loves his handiwork, therefore, because he loves existence.

This is the main question, with what activity one's leisure is filled.

C'mon, let's go join those tedious people.

Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of idleness in the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to idleness but the study of literature; and they do not happen to have a taste for literature. This is a great mistake.

Work is the best remedy for any shock

increased solar activity was correlated with religious impulses in humans.

My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!

A change of work is the best rest.

I'm not sure about whether I shall go. I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather--that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times.

My mind, he said, rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.

Try to remember with description that you must never just let it lie there; nothing in your story should ever be static unless you have a very good reason indeed for keeping your reader still; the essence of the story is motion.

Calmness of mind does not mean you should stop your activity. Real calmness should be found in activity itself. We say, It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.

The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.

Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two foremen in charge of the dream-work, and we may put the shaping of our dreams down mainly to their activity.

The reaction to these claims of impulse and these threats of danger, a reaction in which the real activity of the psychic apparatus is manifested, may be guided correctly by the pleasure-principle or by the reality-principle which modifies this.