Better be idle than ill employed. [ Scotch Proverb ]
He is idle that might be better employed. [ Proverb ]
Happy the man who sees a God employed
In all the good and ill that chequer life! [ Cowper ]
To be employed in useless things, is half to be idle. [ Proverb ]
Ridicule is often employed with more power and success than severity. [ Horace ]
Happy the man who sees a God employed in all the good and ills that checker life. [ Cowper ]
He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed. [ Socrates ]
If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use. [ Addison ]
Time well employed is Satan's deadliest foe; it leaves no opening for the lurking fiend. [ Wilcox ]
Upon the common course of life must our thoughts and our conversation be generally employed. [ Johnson ]
A state is never greater than when all its superfluous hands are employed in the service of the public. [ Hume ]
Alphabets, if rightly understood, can be made to tell their own history, as well as the history of those who employed them. [ Prof. Sayce ]
It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed upon as when they have lost their edge. [ Swift ]
A good character when established should not be rested in as an end, but only employed as a means of doing still further good. [ Atterbury ]
Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors. [ Swift ]
Academical years ought by rights to give occupation to the whole mind. It is this time which, well or ill employed, affects a man's whole after-life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state. [ Montaigne ]
It is observed at sea that men are never so much disposed to grumble and mutiny as when least employed. Hence an old captain, when there was nothing else to do, would issue the order to scour the anchor.
[ Samuel Smiles ]
Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite, are yet so contrived by nature as to be constant companions; and it is a fact that the same motions and muscles of the face are employed both in laughing and crying. [ Charron ]
Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion. [ Goethe ]
Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself. [ Buffon ]
It is a great mortification to the vanity of man that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of Nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the underworkman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces which come from the hand of the master. [ Hume ]
If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you. But I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself; it puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of bad company, and takes up a great deal of time which might be much better employed. [ Chesterfield ]
Experience: in that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external or sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. [ John Locke ]
The motives of the best actions will not bear too strict an inquiry. It is allowed that the cause of most actions, good or bad, may be resolved into the love of ourselves; but the self-love of some men inclines them to please others, and the self-love of others is wholly employed in pleasing themselves. This makes the great distinction between virtue and vice. [ Swift ]
The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]
Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge: it is immortal as the heart of men. If the labors of the men of science should ever create any revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will then sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of the respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on. as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. [ Wordsworth ]