#occupation

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing. ↗

— Manuel Puig

#always #authors #french #german #great

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering. ↗

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#call #honorable #i #i believe #incomparable

In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals. ↗

— James C. Maxwell

#approximately #been #carry #constants #estimated

A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity, it is an occupational risk. ↗

— Oswald Mosley

#achiever #mind #must #never #occasional

The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul. ↗

— Miranda July

#writing-craft #metaphor

Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#busyness #life #living #mind #preoccupation

If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#occupation #opposites #taste #business

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. ↗

— Renata Adler

#bored #boredom #cruel #cruelty #great

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ↗

— Zbigniew Brzezinski

#defines #democracy #does #extremist #first

To such idle talk it might further be added: that whenever a certain exclusive occupation is coupled with specific shortcomings, it is likewise almost certainly divorced from certain other shortcomings. ↗

— Carl Friedrich Gauss

#almost #certain #certainly #coupled #divorced