Famous quotes containing the words busy, beaver and/or function:
“I’m ashamed of myself and this magazine too. The sloppy, slovenly notion that everybody’s busy doing bigger things. Well, there just isn’t anything bigger than beating down the complacence of essentially decent people about prejudice. Yes, I’m ashamed of myself.”
—Moss Hart (1904–1961)
“The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)