All Quotes By Tag: Activity
“The Second Koran tells us that the darkness in ourselves is a sinister thing. It waits until we relax, it waits until we reach the most vulnerable moments, and then it snares us. I want to be dutiful. I want to do what I should. But when I go back to the tube, I think of where I am going; to that small house and my empty room. What will I do tonight? Make more paper flowers, more wreaths? I am sick of them. Sick of the Nekropolis.I can take the tube to my mistress’ house, or I can go by the street where Mardin’s house is. I’m tired. I’m ready to go to my little room and relax. Oh, Holy One, I dread the empty evening. Maybe I should go by the street just to fill up time. I have all this empty time in front of me. Tonight and tomorrow and the week after and the next month and all down through the years as I never marry and become a dried-up woman. Evenings spent folding paper. Days cleaning someone else’s house. Free afternoons spent shopping a bit, stopping in tea shops because my feet hurt. That is what lives are, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning?”
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“Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.”
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“We do not learn for the benefit of anyone, we learn to unlearn ignorance.”
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“Don’t mistake activity with achievement.”
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“Happiness lies in the physical life; sorrow in thought.”
“I think people are happiest when they’re not thinking and just doing things.”
“People don’t need hope to be happy; they need something to do.”
“Is life so complicated? Find out what you like doing and do it.”
“Happiness lies in the active life, sorrow in thought.”
“When we’re not thinking but just doing things, that’s when we’re happiest, when we feel most fulfilled.”
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“Here we must take account of one of St. Thomas’s conceptual distinctions, which at first seems like unnecessary caviling. It is the distinction between “uncreated” and “created” happiness. We have here something which, while not at all obvious, is nevertheless fraught with consequences for our whole feeling about life. Namely, this: what does indeed make us happy is the infinite and uncreated richness of God; but participation in this, happiness itself, is entirely a “creatural” reality governed from within by our humanity; it is not something that descends overwhelmingly upon us from outside. That is, it is not only something that happens to us; we ourselves are intensely active participants in our own happiness. Beatitude – Thomas is saying – cannot possibly be conceived as a merely objective condition of sheer existence. It is not a mere quality, not pure passivity, not simply a feeling. It is something that takes place in the alert core of the mind… Happiness is an act and an activity of the soul.”
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“The world is a busy place filled with many busy businesses, both the Godly and the ungodly. It means before you go on to accept any activity or event that comes into the world, you must weigh its Values, examine the Virtues, listen to Views and then you give your Verdict. Satan is not wise; he is just crafty!”
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“Forget religion. Forget philosophy. Forget your problems and all your precious ideas. Get busy. Go out and enjoy life.”