Seneca the Younger Quotes

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork... They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

You have to think for an email. What's the subject? What's it about? It takes two seconds to think about that. So you have to think, Is this a work thing or a social thing? Which? Then you get into a situation that you don't want to be in, because then people are thinking about it too much.

Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

I think I started to approach time in a different way after the accident. Before I was more willing to give my time to people and things that I wasn't as interested in because somehow I allowed myself to be brainwashed into being forced to work with other people or on other projects that I had no interest in. So simply, the accident gave me the opportunity to do what I really wanted to do.

When you're running a company, you have employees - lots of them - that can interrupt your schedule. You have customers that can interrupt your schedule. You have a certain obligation to wave the flag because people expect to get out and wave the flag. The number of ways that others can command your time is high. At this stage, I get to pick and choose a little more. Not that there aren't some things that have to be done, but I get a little more control over my time.

I told her tea bags were just a convenience for people with busy lives and she said no one is so busy they can't take time to make a decent cup of tea and if you are that busy you don't deserve a decent cup of tea for what is it all about anyway? Are we put into this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?

Most people think it's the other way around: that time is going faster and we're doing less. But really time seems to be going faster because we're cramming so much into it.

Nothing is as certain as that the vices of leisure are gotten rid of by being busy.

I am driven by what you are able to accomplish and how you are able to help some people. I go about it each and every day, sometimes I think I say yes too much and I am too busy in my life.

Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people - It just isn't living at all.

People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living.

In People magazine, Madonna said her life has been exhausting since she started her world tour. She said there isn't a second of her life that isn't taken up looking after her family or thinking of her show - her day is filled with problems of work and family. Someone should tell her, everyone else calls that, life.

I used to think hard work made me come alive, honestly. I used to have a daily work schedule with millions of things on it and I thought, "This is wonderful!"

A person has to be busy to be alive.

Life seems to be busy for most people and if you know you are doing the best you can then there really is nothing more you can do then that.

The big problem is time. I don't have enough of it to do all the things I think about doing.

The only reason I don't do more is because, like all of us, we have busy lives.

You really don't have a life when you're working. I always think "oh, I'm gonna see everybody on my days off. I'm gonna read so many books and see so many films" and then three months go by.

I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.

We've lost our way, we have lost our centeredness. We don't have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what's important. I would bet most people don't have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don't have to be sitting, they can be walking.

You meet people who say, "Oh, I'd like to do such-and-such, but I don't have the time." But it always seemed to me like you make the time. And if you have a wife or a job, if you have kids or whatever, you find a way. If you really want to do it, you make the time.

The trouble with everything, these days, for me, is time. There is only one me. There are a ridiculous number of demands on my time. There are so many things I'm trying to do. It's so much more about when I'm going to get time to do it, if I get time.

I think my biggest career mistake has been taking on too much. And I think this is kind of - I think it's related to the Internet world, where you're always multitasking and you have a million windows open and you feel like you can do a lot at the same time.

I work 12 to 14 hours a day, and in the spare time I do sport.

I think there's always great tension because there never seems to be enough - there is always pressure. There's always pressure because there isn't enough time. There's never enough time for a movie, it seems to me. Never.