A Quote by Gerald Brenan

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

Gerald Brenan

Quote Topics

Ants Butterflies Closer Endure Few Few People Leisure Much People Than Very

Quote Author

Gerald Brenan
English - Writer
April 7, 1894 - January 19, 1987

Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now everybody's got more leisure time they're complaining they're unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want.

Prince Philip

When we start shooting I don't have rehearsals with characters at all. So, rather than pulling them towards myself, I travel closer to them; it's very much closer to the real person than anything I try to create. So I give them something but I also take from them.

Abbas Kiarostami

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Bertrand Russell

Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. ... What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.

Vernon Lee

There are few people who are more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be so.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

I am a book reviewer. I write for a glossy magazine called 'SCI FI.' The money is not life-changing, but it's a low-stress gig. Publishers send me their books. More than I could possibly read. I pick a few and write about them, put a very few others on the shelf, to be perused at my leisure, someday.

Adam-Troy Castro

Some people are like ants. Give them a warm day and a piece of ground and they start digging. There the similarity ends. Ants keepon digging. Most people don't. They establish contact with the soil, absorb so much vernal vigor that they can't stay in one place, and desert the fork or spade to see how the rhubarb is coming and whether the asparagus is yet in sight.

Hal Borland

This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything...just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.

Charles Bukowski

Australia will always be closer to the U.S. than she is to China because our values and political traditions are much closer.

John Howard

And I was very, very much influenced by the films of Jean Cocteau and by Sartre and everything that came out of France because it was closer than America or England.

Astrid Kirchherr

I like to feel the butterflies in the stomach, I like to go home and have a restless night and wonder how I'm going to be able to accomplish this feat, get jittery. That hunger and those butterflies in the stomach are very essential for all creative people.

Amitabh Bachchan

Leisure is not synonymous with time. Nor is it a noun. Leisure is a verb. I leisure. You leisure.

Mortimer Adler

I think very few people realize how much the separation of church and state has to do with the fact that Americans are not only more religious than a lot of other people in the world but that conversions are much more common here.