#occupation

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

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. ↗

— Barbara Ehrenreich

#build #encampment #ever #ground #had

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

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation. ↗

— Sinclair Lewis

#season #winter

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind. ↗

— Ernst Mach

#every #fact #forced #general #his

I take it that he is more than just a woodcutter. "No one is just a woodcutter, " replied Terence. "A person's always more than his present occupation. ↗

— Gerald Morris

#job #life #occupation #attitude

The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#life #occupation #soul #wisdom #work

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political. ↗

— Iain Pears

#laziness #occupation #occupied-france #politics #war

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. ↗

— Graham Greene

#creative-process #daily-life #preoccupations #subconscious #superficiality

In the midst of the heavy, hot fragrance of summer, and of the clean salty smell of the sea, there was the odor of wounded men, a sickly odor of blood and antiseptics which marked the zone of every military hospital. All Athens quickly took on that odor, as the wounded Greek soldiers were moved out of hospitals and piled into empty warehouses to make way for German wounded. Now every church, every empty lot, every school building in Athens is full of wounded, and on the pathways of Zappion, the park in the heart of Athens, bandaged men in makeshift wheel chairs are to be seen wherever one walks. Zappion is a profusion of flowers, heavy-scented luxurious flowers; but even the flower fragrance is not as strong as that of blood. ↗

— Betty Wason

#blood #flowers #fragrance #military-occupation #odor