98 Quotes About Busyness

Being American was like getting a good shellacking--whatever that meant. He'd heard it, and it sounded right for how he was feeling. These people did things all day long. They were frantic. They ate lunch in their cars and never had a siesta. They even went to church in their cars. Or on their TVs.

Needs multiply as they are met. Woe to the man who would live a disentangled life. Be on guard, my soul, of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth!

I laid in the grass one day instead of walking through my day. And what I found was that laying in the grass gave me an unexpectedly vast view of the sky. For while I walk under it as I incessantly rush to meet the demands of each day, I rarely look up into it as a means of celebrating the privilege of each day. So maybe I should spend more time in the grass and less time on my feet.

Everyone seemed to be in a blind hurry, and there was no relief in sight. Technology rushed us ever forward, and simple civility - a certain kindness and care - got sacrificed.

Humans are busier now than they've ever been in the history of time. I love technology, but with all the advancements to make our lives easier, it's really just allowed us to go faster.

Juggling and balancing effectively required that we make clear, legacy-driven choices about what we're trying to keep in the air and how we sequence our movements down the beam. Because the ultimate grade in life is not based on how far and fast we've walked the beam or how many things we’ve juggled—it’s based on how much we've enjoyed the exercise.

We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true, or if it is true, then our situations were so temporary that they would have collapsed anyway.

I think the church is often a culprit in the busyness, especially in the evangelical church. Again, it's part of being Americans. Part of being evangelicals too is that we're highly activist. We are always diving in, willing to solve problems, and again there's a lot good there. But we also need the theological balance that the Kingdom is not ours to bring or ours to create.

A busy life makes it harder to truly experience the sensual world. So, slow down.