Busy Beaver/the Busy Beaver Function %cf%83

Famous quotes containing the words busy, beaver and/or function:

    Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber.
    Thou hast no figures, nor no fantasies,
    Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
    Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    This ferry was as busy as a beaver dam, and all the world seemed anxious to get across the Merrimack River at this particular point, waiting to get set over,—children with their two cents done up in paper, jail-birds broke lose and constable with warrant, travelers from distant lands to distant lands, men and women to whom the Merrimack River was a bar.
    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)