“The busy bee has no time for sorrow.”
William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist
Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Line 11
“A comely olde man as busie as a bee.”
Source: Euphues and his England, P. 252.
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John Lyly29
English politician 1554–1606Related quotes
“The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.”
Mark Nepo (1951) American writer
“A busy buzzing bee is a lot like me, it works and it lives in community.”
Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician
"A Busy Buzzing Bee"
A Picnic of Poems in Allah's Green Garden (2011)
“Bees are not as busy as we think they are. They jest can't buzz any slower.”
Kin Hubbard (1868–1930) cartoonist
As quoted in Reading I've Liked : A Personal Selection Drawn from Two Decades of Reading (1941) by Clifton Fadiman, p. 827.
Variants:
A bee is never as busy as it seems; it's just that it can't buzz any slower.
As quoted in The Modern Handbook of Humor (1967) by Ralph Louis Woods, p. 17
The bee isn't really that busy — it just can't buzz any slower.
As quoted in Peter's People (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 29.
“Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
The Divinity College Address (1838)
“Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.”
André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer
Quoted in The Aging American
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old
Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …
“Be valyaunt, but not too venturous. Let thy attyre bee comely, but not costly.”
Source: Euphues (Arber [1580]), P. 39. Compare: "Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,/ But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy", William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act i, sc. 3.
George Peele (1556–1596) English translator and poet
Polyhymnia (1590), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).