When men consider the great pains, industry, and parts, that have, for so many ages, been laid out on the cultivation and advancem...ent of the sciences, and that notwithstanding all this, the far greater part of them remain full of darkness and uncertainty, and that, taking all together, a small portion of them doth supply any real benefit to mankind, otherwise than by being an innocent diversion and amusement: I say, the consideration of all this is apt to throw them into a despondency, and perfect contempt of all study.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mou...ntain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Public morning diversions were the last dissipating habit she obtained; but when that was accomplished, her time was squandered aw...ay, the power of reflection was lost, [and] her ideas were all centered in dress, drums, routs, operas, masquerades, and every kind of public diversion. Visionary schemes of pleasure were continually present to her imagination, and her brain was whirled about by such a dizziness that she might properly be said to labor under the distemper called the vertigo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[F]rom Saratoga [N.Y.] till we got back to Northampton [Mass.], was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34. years of free and good ...government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles and priests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In these great times which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it ...... in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves redhanded, are groping for words ... in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me--none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only thing which consoles for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which pr...incipally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us imperceptibly ruin ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Without [diversion] we would be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us on to seek a more solid means of escapin...g from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without stud...y. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately rise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »