Activity Quotes

I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
Honor de Balzac



We do not wish, we do not need to expel the Arabs and take their place. All our aspirations are built upon the assumption proven throughout all our activity in the Land that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.
David Ben-Gurion



Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Jorge Luis Borges



For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the well is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function.
Aristotle



Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.
Matthew Arnold



I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.
Sir Alfred Jules Ayer



The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
James Graham Ballard



Ennui is the desire of activity without the fit means of gratifying the desire.
George Bancroft



The modern moralists extol the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.
Julien Benda



It had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity.
Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury



If ... we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence ... human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete
Aristotle



It is part of my duty as a decent member of my local hamlet to mow the grass in front of the church. It's a pleasant little task and mowing is a favorite activity of mine; it gives me a lot of pleasure to make the churchyard look tidy. I sometimes pause at the grave of someone or other and speculate what he might have been like when he was alive, but gravestones don't tell much.
Tom Baker



The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
Roland Barthes



This is the concept of art that carries within itself not only the revolutionizing of the historic bourgeois concept of knowledge (materialism, positivism), but also of religious activity. EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who from his state of freedom the position of freedom that he experience at firsthand learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.. ..THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL IS BORN.
Joseph Beuys



Nietzsche argued that the spirits bow was being unbent and risked being permanently unstrung. Its activity, he believed, comes from culture, and the decay of culture meant not only the decay of man in this culture but the decay of man simply. This is the crisis he tried to face resolutely: the very existence of man as man, as a noble being, depended on him and on men like himso he thought.
Allan David Bloom