This is because being “busy” is not a virtue; it only signals to others that you do not know how to manage your time or your tasks.

This, to a busy mind like his, was a truly deplorable situation; and had he not been a man of inflexible morals and regular habits, there would have been great danger of his taking to politics or drinking — both which pernicious vices we daily see men driven to by mere spleen and idleness.

Maybe no great man is virtuous. Or good. Perhaps a man rich in those qualities by definition is barred from greatness.

"When one of a culture's guiding credos is that "all men are created equal," any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance."

A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.

What we term virtue is often but a mass of various actions and divers interests, which fortune, or our own industry, manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

The virtue of a man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his every-day conduct.

The most serious misfortune for a busy man who is overwhelmed by his possessions is, that he believes men to be his friends when he himself is not a friend to them, and that he deems his favours to be effective in winning friends, although, in the case of certain men, the more they owe, the more they hate.

A perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.

Lord,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, perhaps quoting someone, “make us not great but busy.

Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim but to make others as wretched as themselves. Wherefore it is nothing wonderful, if they be generally troublesome and odious to their fellow man.

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions