“The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you are finished.”
Variant: The problem with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished.
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Nelson DeMille9
American writer 1943Related quotes
Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)
Elizabeth Goudge book The Little White Horse
Source: The Little White Horse
“A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.”
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist
W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords
"A Poet of the Actual", p. 265
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Context: A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.
“When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.”
Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist
The New Gods (1969)
Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
Introducing John F. Kennedy in 1960, as quoted in Adlai Stevenson and The World: The Life of Adlai E. Stevenson (1977) by John Bartlow Martin, p. 549