Purposeful Activity Quotes

If you're doing creative work, that work should never feel trivial - even if what you're doing is for hire or lightly intended. Even the mundane doesn't have to be trivial.

Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.

There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully.

There is no point in doing a lengthy role if there is no importance in it.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.

Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back.

What I don't want to do is just play for the sake of playing.

Know what you're trying to do before you do it. Turning knobs at random isn't enlightening any more than throwing paint at a wall blindfolded will let you paint a nice picture.

Labor is the instituted means for the methodical development of all our powers under the direction and control of the will.

There is no such thing as 'on the way out' as long as you are still doing something interesting and good; you're in the business because you're breathing.

Be not solitary, be not idle

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

It's possible to make things that aren't just money-makers. Something wonderful for its own sake.

Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.

Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life....My precept is, do something, my sister, do good if you can; but at any rate, do something.

Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self, and it is a task no longer; it is joy; it is art.

I like reading books with both hands, with my heart pumping, with blood on the page. So I'm interested in people who make stuff, and I'm interested in the lives that make the text. To read a book or watch a movie any other way, to me, personally, feels like a waste of time and misapplication of energy.

I believe that labor is a blessing. It never was and never will be a curse. It is a blessed thing to labor for . . . the ones you love. It is a blessed thing to have an object in life - something to do - something to call into play your best thoughts, to develop your faculties and to make you a man.

The goal has its importance. But the doing is what is truly fulfilling. Every enthusiastic person has a goal that may be important, but the doing is intensely fulfilling, and it is the essence of enthusiasm.

Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

The essential question is not, "How busy are you?" but "What are you busy at?"

And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness. The lesser meaning of work is the achieving of self-preservation.