"Rather do what is nothing to the purpose than be idle; that the devil may find thee doing. The bird that sits is easily shot, when fliers scape the fowler. Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all the virtues, and the self-made sepulchre of a living man."

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Source : Francis Quarles (1844). “Enchiridion Institutions, Essays and Maxims, political, moral & divine. Divided into four centuries. By Francis Quarles”, p.85

Francis Quarles

#Men Quotes #Self Quotes #Sea Quotes

“You can tell a lot about a person from his underwear.”
“You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin, and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.”
“Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.”

Source : Margaret Oliphant (2014). “Miss Marjoribanks”, p.430, The Floating Press
“The Official Bulletin declared that the Poles should be as proud of me as the Germans are of Mozart; obvious nonsense.”
“Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.”

Source : Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “Very Far Away from Anywhere Else”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
“It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.”

Source : Alfred Russel Wallace (1869). “The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise”, p.267, London, Macmillan
“I feel great. I feel younger. And I don't feel anything at all. I don't know who knows, but right now I'm, how, how many years have I, fifty five, something like that. Forty three years old. And I feel like seventeen, like twenty five years ago.”
“But I'll never see any of those fish," said Maxie."Or those whales. Or any lions or tigers. I'm never going to set foot in a rain forest now, am I? I won't even be able to watch old DVD's about them without electricity. What does the future hold? It's like going back to the middle ages. Nobody knowing what was going on beyond their front doorstep. All I'll ever know is this. This little bit of London.”

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