Quotes about wasting
page 13

“Follow your desire as long as you live and do not perform more than is ordered; do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit… When riches are gained, follow desire, for riches will not profit if one is sluggish.”

Ptahhotep Ancient Egyptian vizier

Maxim no. 11.
The Maxims of Ptahhotep (c. 2350 BCE)

Time

“Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west and east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.”

Langdon Smith Evolution

Evolution (1895; 1909)

“Bad herdsmen waste the flocks which thou hast left behind.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XVII. 246 (tr. Worsley).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

“Atheists are also morally obligated to tell the truth as we see it. We should preach and proselytize too. We need to help believers. Someone who believes in god is wasting big parts of his or her life, holding back science and love, and giving "moral" support to dangerous extremists. If you believe something, you must share it; it's one of the ways we all learn about truth.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

p. 62 http://books.google.com/books?id=OqwtBujvOmgC&pg=PA62&dq=%22atheists+are+also+morally+obligated%22 2010s, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (2011)

Love, Life, God, Truth

“Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Source: Letters to a Young Scientist (2013), chapter 5, "The Creative Process", page 69.

Failure

“I have actually programmed a fair bit in Perl, like I have C++ code published with my name on it. Other things I have tried and have no intention to do again if I can at all avoid it include smoking, getting drunk enough to puke and waste the whole next day with hang-over, breaking a leg in a violent car crash, getting mugged in New York City, or travel with Aeroflot.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: How is perl braindamaged? (was Re: Is LISP dying?) http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/37b0ddc2524a8214 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Perl

Cars, Travel

“The Filipino, it seems, has lost his soul, his dignity, and his courage.

We have come upon a phase of our history when ideals are only a veneer for greed and power, (in public and private affairs) when devotion to duty and dedication to a public trust are to be weighted at all times against private advantages and personal gain, and when loyalties can be traded.

…Our government is in the iron grip of venality, its treasury is barren, its resources are wasted, its civil service is slothful and indifferent, its armed forces demoralized and its councils sterile.,

We are in crisis. You know that the government treasury is empty. Only by severe self-denial will there be hope for recovery within the next year…

This nation can be great again. This I have said over and over. It is my articles of faith, and Divine Providence has willed that you and I can now translate this faith into deeds.”

Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) former President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986

Mandate for Greatness,” First Inaugural Speech of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, 30 December 1965.
1965

Faith, Hope, Soul, History

“Yes, Johannes Vermeer [Dutch 17th century master painter] paints in thin layers – there is no waste effort – and those small dots – no, they are not like Seurat's, though they contain all the light the pointillist may have wished for, concentrated, hovering before the object, but not obliterating it... Vermeer is not a sun painter, but rather a moon-painter – like Uccello – that's good, it is the pure, final stage of art, the moment when it becomes more real than reality.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), pp. 357-58: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher]], 1947

Art, Reality, Effort, Light

“A good skeptical mind doesn't waste itself on drugs or ideology, and prefers to break the rules in our minds, in the form of humor, rather than in real life.”

Mark Rosenfelder American language inventor

From an elegy http://www.zompist.com/dfcdead.html to the Dysfunctional Family Circus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysfunctional_Family_Circus

Life

“In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

pg 486
The City in History (1961)

People, Age, Food, Communication

“There are two distinct types of bike: The one you save up for and buy yourself, otherwise known as the 'Dream Machine', and the one your parents buy for you, otherwise known as the 'Complete waste of space.”

Peter Corey (1946) British writer

Quotes from specific Coping With Books, Coping with Cash

Dreams, Parent

“I hate to waste a really good threat.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, Guilty Pleasures (1993)

Hate

“In AH 871 (AD 1466-67) he started for the conquest of Karnãl [Girnãr] which is now known as JûnãgaDh. It is said that this country had been in the possession of the predecessors of Rãi Mandalîk for the past two thousand years… Sultãn Mahmûd relied on the help of Allãh and proceeded there; on the way he laid waste the land of SoraTh… From that place the Sultãn went towards the temple of those people. Many Rajpûts who were known as Parwhãn, decided to lay down their lives, and started fighting with swords and spears in (defence) of the temple… Sultãn Mahmûd postponed the conquest of the fort to the next year… and returned to Ahmadãbãd.”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Mahmûd BegDhã of Gujarat (AD 1458-1511) Junagadh (Gujarat)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

People, Way, Past, Help

“The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.”

Anne Rice The Tale of the Body Thief

The Tale of the Body Thief (1992)

Youth

“I recommend that you provide the resources to carry forward, with full vigor, the great health and education programs that you enacted into law last year. I recommend that we prosecute with vigor and determination our war on poverty. I recommend that you give a new and daring direction to our foreign aid program, designed to make a maximum attack on hunger and disease and ignorance in those countries that are determined to help themselves, and to help those nations that are trying to control population growth. I recommend that you make it possible to expand trade between the United States and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I recommend to you a program to rebuild completely, on a scale never before attempted, entire central and slum areas of several of our cities in America. I recommend that you attack the wasteful and degrading poisoning of our rivers, and, as the cornerstone of this effort, clean completely entire large river basins. I recommend that you meet the growing menace of crime in the streets by building up law enforcement and by revitalizing the entire federal system from prevention to probation. I recommend that you take additional steps to insure equal justice to all of our people by effectively enforcing nondiscrimination in federal and state jury selection, by making it a serious federal crime to obstruct public and private efforts to secure civil rights, and by outlawing discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. I recommend that you help me modernize and streamline the federal government by creating a new Cabinet-level Department of Transportation and reorganizing several existing agencies. In turn, I will restructure our civil service in the top grades so that men and women can easily be assigned to jobs where they are most needed, and ability will be both required as well as rewarded. I will ask you to make it possible for members of the House of Representatives to work more effectively in the service of the nation through a constitutional amendment extending the term of a Congressman to four years, concurrent with that of the President. Because of Vietnam we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do. We will ruthlessly attack waste and inefficiency. We will make sure that every dollar is spent with the thrift and with the commonsense which recognizes how hard the taxpayer worked in order to earn it. We will continue to meet the needs of our people by continuing to develop the Great Society. Last year alone the wealth that we produced increased $47 billion, and it will soar again this year to a total over $720 billion. Because our economic policies have produced rising revenues, if you approve every program that I recommend tonight, our total budget deficit will be one of the lowest in many years. It will be only $1.8 billion next year. Total spending in the administrative budget will be $112.8 billion. Revenues next year will be $111 billion. On a cash basis—which is the way that you and I keep our family budget—the federal budget next year will actually show a surplus. That is to say, if we include all the money that your government will take in and all the money that your government will spend, your government next year will collect one-half billion dollars more than it will spend in the year 1967. I have not come here tonight to ask for pleasant luxuries or for idle pleasures. I have come here to recommend that you, the representatives of the richest nation on earth, you, the elected servants of a people who live in abundance unmatched on this globe, you bring the most urgent decencies of life to all of your fellow Americans.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Women, Men, Money

“Weakened and wasted to skin and bone.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

Second Week, Fourth Day, Book iv. Compare: "Bone and Skin, two millers thin, Would starve us all, or near it; But be it known to Skin and Bone That Flesh and Blood can’t bear it", John Byrom, Epigram on Two Monopolists.
La Seconde Semaine (1584)

“To produce 1 lb. of feedlot beef requires 7 lbs. of feed grain, which takes 7,000 lbs. of water to grow. Pass up one hamburger, and you'll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle. Yet in the U. S., 70% of all the wheat, corn and other grain produced goes to feeding herds of livestock. Around the world, as more water is diverted to raising pigs and chickens instead of producing crops for direct consumption, millions of wells are going dry. … In the U. S., livestock now produce 130 times as much waste as people do. Just one hog farm in Utah, for example, produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles. These megafarms are proliferating, and in populous areas their waste is tainting drinking water. In more pristine regions, from Indonesia to the Amazon, tropical rain forest is being burned down to make room for more and more cattle. … We, at least, have the flexibility—the omnivorous stomach and creative brain—to adapt. We can do it by moving down the food chain: eating foods that use less water and land, and that pollute far less, than cows and pigs do. In the long run, we can lose our memory of eating animals, and we will discover the intrinsic satisfactions of a diverse plant-based diet, as millions of people already have.”

Ed Ayres (1941) American magazine editor

"Will We Still Eat Meat?", in Time magazine (8 November 1999), pp. 1 http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,992523-1,00.html- 2 http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,992523-2,00.html.

People, World, Food, Angels

“I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

Coolidge's Inaugural Address (4 March 1925).
1920s

Life, Women, Men, Money

“The strong environmental position should not be and cannot be to do nothing, and to put our heads in the sand and pretend that the problem does not exist. It would be nice if Texas had no low-level radioactive waste, or Vermont or Maine or any other State. That would be great. That is not the reality. The environmental challenge now is, given the reality that low-level radioactive waste exists, what is the safest way of disposing of that waste. Leaving the radioactive waste at the site where it was produced, despite the fact that that site may be extremely unsafe in terms of long-term isolation of the waste and was never intended to be a long- term depository of low-level waste, is horrendous environmental policy. What sense is it to say that you have to keep the waste where it is now, even though that might be very environmentally damaging? That does not make any sense at all. No reputable scientist or environmentalist believes that the geology of Vermont or Maine would be a good place for this waste. In the humid climate of Vermont and Maine, it is more likely that groundwater will come in contact with that waste and carry off radioactive elements to the accessible environment. There is widespread scientific evidence to suggest, on the other hand, that locations in Texas, some of which receive less than 12 inches of rainfall a year, a region where the groundwater table is more than 700 feet below the surface, is a far better location for this waste. This is not a political assertion, it is a geological and environmental reality. … From an environmental point of view, I urge strong support for this legislation.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Speaking at the House of Representatives on the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact, in 7 October 1997. https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/1997/10/7/house-section/article/h8512-1?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22%5C%22all+that+Texas+and+Maine+and+Vermont+are+asking+for+today%5C%22%22%5D%7D&r=1 1990s

Way, Support, Problem, Reality

“Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself; do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, been prevented from participating actively in it, and that you are superflous in the obtruse eyes of a busy world, above all, do not permit this to deprive you of your idea of yourself, as if your life, if lived in inwardness, did not have just as much meaning and worth as that of any human being in the eyes of all-wise Governance, and considerably more than the busy, busiest haste of busy-ness - busy with wasting life and losing itself.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

' Letter to Kierkegaard's cousin Hans Peter http://books.google.de/books?id=CUfkNXWLyboC&pg=PR21 (1848) 1840s

Love, Life, World, Way

“The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed steadily into his face.
"They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, wringing his hands with earnestness. "You must have seen my daughter, for she makes a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?"
Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That daughter, from whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"Ethan Brand" (1850)

World, Soul, Girl, Daughters

“"Don't waste your life, Tom." "I think I already have, father." "You're just young. It seems like that when you're young. Life's nothing but joy or misery when you're young."”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

Thomas of Hookton and Father Hobbe, p. 140
The Grail Quest, The Archer's Tale/Harlequin (2000)

Life, Thinking, Joy

“Make an eternal spring;
Give life to this dark world which lieth dead.
Spread forth thy golden hair
In larger locks than thou wast wont before,
And emperor-like decore
With diadem of pearl thy temples fair.”

William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649) British writer

"Phoebus Arise".
Poems (1616)

Life, World, Spring, Dead

“If you're tolerating sin in your life, my friend, don't waste your breath praying unless it's a prayer of confession.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

Life

“I don't feel I'm old. I just feel I'm me. And I've always been a happy person. I love the human race. I love my work. I love the world—I've been around it four times, you know. And I'm a believing person. I believe in God, even though I can't see him. You can't see the air in this room, right? But take it away and you're dead. And I believe there's something for us after we die. The world isn't wasteful. It keeps going on and I think we do too.”

Lillian Gish (1893–1993) American actress

As quoted in Lillian Gish : Her Legend, Her Life (2002) by Charles Affron, p. 353

Love, God, Happiness, World

“I'm sort of planting Post-It notes all over my psyche. Do not skateboard wasted. Do not buy $10,000 rugs. Be careful what you say to journalists. You don't have to stay up until 7 A. M.”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

tomorrow is a new day.
Blender (December 2003)

“There are scarcely fifteen art-collectors in Paris capable of liking a painter without the backing of the Salon. There are eighty thousands of them who wouldn't buy a thing from a painter who is not in the [Paris'] Salon. I am not going to be so foolish as to condemn a thing just because of where it happens to be. In short, I'm not going to waste my time bearing a grudge against the Salon – I don't even want to look as if I do. To my mind, one must simply paint as well as one possibly can – and that's all.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, pp. 127-128 : in his letter to Durand-Ruel (1880's), explaining his choice to participate in the yearly official Salon as well as in the Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, on the same time.

Art, Time, Painting

“I would waste my rhetoric if I tried, for men are greedy and will not see the truth for the gleam of coin.”

Michael Moorcock book The Mad God's Amulet

Book 1, Chapter 5 “The Machine” (p. 160)
The Mad God's Amulet (1968)

Men, Truth

“You can’t even trade a single fart with the next guy. Each and every one of us has to live out his own life. Don’t waste time thinking about who’s most talented.”

Kodo Sawaki (1880–1965) Japanese zen Buddhist monk

Zen ni kike (To you) (Tokyo: Daihorinkaku, 1987)

Life, Guy, Thinking, Time

“Don't waste your tremendous voice writing messages in the sand.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Speaking at Bringing the Circle Together.

Powerful

“It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy; power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy. This is why the weak are so deeply concerned with the democratic principle of the sovereign equality of states, as a means of providing some small measure of equality for that which is not equal in fact. Coming from a developing country, I was trained extensively in international law and diplomacy and mistakenly assumed that the great powers, especially the United States, also trained their representatives in diplomacy and accepted the value of it. But the Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States. Diplomacy is perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1922–2016) 6th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Unvanquished : A U.S. - U.N. Saga (1999), p. 198.
1990s

Law, Time, Training, Country

“Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Haunted (2005)

Shoe, Dead

“To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren't very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

1960's

Art, Teachers

“A clear horizon — nothing to worry about on your plate, only things that are creative and not destructive and that's withing yourself. Within me I can't bear quarreling, I can't bear feelings between people. I think hatred is wasted energy and it's all non-productive. I'm very sensitive. A sharp word, said by a person who has a temper, if they're close to me, hurts me for days. I know we're only human, we do go in for these various emotions, call them negative emotions but when all these are removed and you can look forward, and the road is clear ahead, and now you're going to create something. I think that's as happy as I would ever want to be.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

Hitchcock's Definition of Happiness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14dOICbwSIs (YouTube video), excerpt from CBC's interview 'A Talk with Alfred Hitchcock' (1964). Quoted in "Hitchcock's Secret to Happiness" http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/hitchcocks-secret-to-happiness/254769/ by Maria Popova, The Atlantic (20 March 2012).

Happiness, People, Feeling, Thinking

“Grant of patience (from Allah) is in proportion to the extent of calamity you are passing through. If you exhibit fretfulness, irritation, and despair in calamities, then your patience and your exertions are wasted.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Patience, Despair

“Even in childhood's innocence of pleasure
Lives that destroying spirit which in time
Will waste, then want, the best of happiness.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Happiness, Pleasure, Time, Childhood

“Eliminate all forms of monopolistic market power, to include the breakup of large oligopolistic corporations and application of anti-trust laws to labor unions. A Federal incorporation law could be used to limit corporation size and where technology required giant firms for reasons of low cost production the Federal government should own and operate them… Promote economic stability by reform of the monetary system and establishment of stable rules for monetary policy… Reform the tax system and promote equity through income tax… Abolish all tariffs… Limit waste by restricting advertising and other wasteful merchandising practices.”

Henry Calvert Simons (1899–1946) American economist

A Positive Program for Laissez Faire, (1934)

Law

“I don't dwell in the past; I don't wallow in old events and emotions. I don't waste time on regret. No use going over and over the details of what already happened.”

Yanni (1954) Greek pianist, keyboardist, composer, and music producer

Yanni in Words. Miramax Books. Co-author David Rensin

Time, Past

“Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life’s fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust’s opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe’s own impeachment of Kant and Hegel. Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 105

Life, Feeling, Thinking, Sense

“We [atheists] weren't the ones who came up with homeland security, conveniently ignoring inconvenient amendments in our own Bill of Rights. We aren't the ones determined to exploit fossil fuels to the exclusion of all better options, and we're not the ones wasting our resources like there's no tomorrow, because we're not the ones who actually believe there's no tomorrow. If you think these are the Last Days, then you're not going to prepare for the future, and if you elect such a person, then you are hiring them to lead you to your doom. Atheists are typically not the ones diverting millions of dollars into atrocious military offenses while simultaneously trying to defund beneficial public welfare programs like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Don't Blame the Atheists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Ca88xNw_w (October 21, 2012)

Education, Thinking, Future, Personality

“Food redistribution is one of the best win-win solutions for food waste avoidance. Food companies can often save money by donating food rather than paying the £80 or so per tonne in landfill tax and disposal costs.”

Tristram Stuart (1977) British historian

"Food redistribution is a win-win solution for food waste" https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/food-waste-redistribution-sustainable-solution, The Guardian (11 May 2012).

Money, Food

“I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,'yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam [Rig-Veda, 1.24.7]. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing…. Wanton waste, careless spoiling of physical things in an incredibly short time, loose disorder, misuse of service and materials due either to vital grasping or to tamasic inertia are baneful to prosperity and tend to drive away or discourage the Wealth-Power. These things have long been rampant in the society and, if that continues, an increase in our means might well mean a proportionate increase in the wastage and disorder and neutralise the material advantage. This must be remedied if there is to be any sound progress…. Asceticism for its own sake is not the ideal of this yoga, but self-control in the vital and right order in the material are a very important part of it… and even an ascetic discipline is better for our purpose than a loose absence of true control. Mastery of the material does not mean having plenty and profusely throwing it out or spoiling it as fast as it comes or faster. Mastery implies in it the right and careful utilisation of things and also a self-control in their use…. There is a consciousness in [things], a life which is not the life and consciousness of man and animal which we know, but still secret and real. That is why we must have a respect for physical things and use them rightly, not misuse and waste, ill-treat or handle with a careless roughness. This feeling of all being consciousness or alive comes when our own physical consciousness'and not the mind only'awakes out of its obscurity and becomes aware of the One in all things, the Divine everywhere.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Undated
India's Rebirth

Life, Children, Truth, Secret

“On my native planet, whenever I had been dismayed by the suffering and the futility of individuals, I had taken comfort in the thought that at least the massed effect of all our blind striving must be the slow but glorious awakening of the human spirit. This hope, this certainty, had been the one sure consolation. But now I saw that there was no guarantee of any such triumph. It seemed that the universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must of course be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spirit grew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a whole world of sensitive spirits fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horror it seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 3. The Prospects of the Race (pp. 44-45)

Hate, Fate, World, Hope

“Red lights are like queues. They are for people who have time to waste.”

Stephen Clarke book A Year in the Merde

On traffic
A Year in the Merde (2005)

People, Light, Time

“They've been spending most their lives
Living in a pastime paradise.
They've been spending most their lives
Living in a pastime paradise.
They've been wasting most their time
Glorifying days long gone behind,
They've been wasting most their days
In remembrance of ignorance oldest praise.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

Pastime Paradise
Song lyrics, Songs In The Key of Life (1976)

Time

“What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror.… The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.”

David Hull (1935–2010) American philosopher

Reviewing Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial for Nature in 1992, as quoted in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith Vol. 45, p. 47 (1993) by American Scientific Affiliation

Death, God, Pain, Indifference

“The individual effort method of increasing the reward of the wage-earner includes all that is best in other methods, and attempts to exclude all that is objectionable. Its good points are summed up as follows:
# The standard time set is reasonable and one that can be reached without extraordinary effort, is in fact such time as a good foreman would demand.
# An extra reward of one-fifth of the regular wages for the operation is given to whoever makes standard time.
# Extra compensation above the hourly rate is paid even if standard time is not reached, although this extra compensation diminishes in percentage above standard time-and-a-half.
# If longer than time-and-a-half is taken, the regulai day rate is paid. Of this, the wage-earner is also sure.
# Standard time is carefully determined by observation and experiment, and is only changed when conditions change.
# The arrangement is one of mutual benefit to both parties — of increased earning to the worker, of increased saving to the employer.
# The employer loses more than the wage-earner if schedules do not encourage co-operation.
# The wage-earner, working on a schedule, becomes in a large degree his own foreman.
# The wage-earner determines his own earning power, and by co-operating to cut out wastes increases his own value.”

Harrington Emerson (1853–1931) American efficiency engineer and business theorist

Harrison Emerson, " Shop betterment and the individual effort method of profit-sharing http://archive.org/stream/americanengineer80newy#page/64/mode/1up" in: International Railway Journal Vol. 13. p. 61. 1905; Partly cited in Drury (1918, p. 141)

Effort, Change, Time

“He was a child, and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost-stories and German romances.”

Matthew Lewis (writer) (1775–1818) English novelist and dramatist

Walter Scott, manuscript note written in 1825; cited from J. G. Lockhart The Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1896) p. 81 col. 2.
Criticism

Imagination

“The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.”

Thomas Love Peacock book Melincourt

Melincourt, chapter XXIV.

“Questions and answers click into each other like cogs of a machine. Each person has nothing but quite definite tasks. The various professions are concentrated at definite places. One eats while in motion. Amusements are concentrated in other parts of the city. And elsewhere again are the towers to which one returns and finds wife, family, gramophone, and soul. Tension and relaxation, activity and love are meticulously kept separate in time and are weighed out according to formulae arrived at in extensive laboratory work. If during any of these activities one runs up against a difficulty, one simply drops the whole thing; for one will find another thing or perhaps, later on, a better way, or someone else will find the way that one has missed. It does not matter in the least, but nothing wastes so much communal energy as the presumption that one is called upon not to let go of a definite personal aim. In a community with energies constantly flowing through it, every road leads to a good goal, if one does not spend too much time hesitating and thinking it over. The targets are set up at a short distance, but life is short too, and in this way one gets a maximum of achievement out of it. And man needs no more for his happiness; for what one achieves is what moulds the spirit, whereas what one wants, without fulfillment, only warps it. So far as happiness is concerned it matters very little what one wants; the main thing is that one should get it. Besides, zoology makes it clear that a sum of reduced individuals may very well form a totality of genius.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Love, Life, Happiness, Family

“p>Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late
And studying all the summer night
Her matchless songs does meditate;Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grasses's fall;Ye glow-worms whose officious flame
To wandering mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim
And after foolish fires do stray;Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

The Mover to the Glow-worms

War, Way, Home, Study

“In an effort to salvage the money I wasted on this bullshit, I ate six cups of jello, one bag of corn nuts, a Soynut bar, and a bag of jelly beans for dinner. The only thing X-TREME about this experience was the X-TREME dump I took later that night:”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

Take your X-TREME marketing and shove it. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=xtreme_bullshit The Best Page in the Universe

Money, Effort, Night

“Ridge-dormers have many other advantages. In winter, when closed… it is nature's own method of lighting. Ridge-dormers greatly reduce the height of the building; because bringing into use space heretofore wasted, the eaves may be correspondingly lowered.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Source: Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922), Ch. III

Nature, Light, Winter

“A gun cracked, quite close to the tent. Soldier's instinct pulled Lee's head up. Then he smiled and laughed to himself. One of his staff officers, most likely, shooting at a possum or squirrel. He hoped the young man had scored a hit. But no sooner had the smile appeared than it vanished. The report of the gun sounded- odd. It had been an abrupt bark, not a pistol shot or the deeper boom of an Enfield rifle musket. Maybe it was a captured Federal weapon. The gun cracked again and again and again. Each report came closer to the one than two heartbeats were to each other. A Federal weapon indeed, Lee thought: one of those fancy repeaters their cavalry like so well. The fusillade went on and on. He frowned at the waste of precious cartridges- no Southern armory could easily duplicate them. He frowned once more, this time in puzzlement, when silence fell. He had automatically kept track of the number of rounds fired. No Northern rifle he knew was a thirty-shooter. He turned his mind back to the letter to President Davis. -Valley, he wrote. Then gunfire rang out again, an unbelievably rapid stutter of shots, altogether too quick to count and altogether unlike anything he had ever heard. He took off his glasses and set down the pen. Then he put on a hat and got up to see what was going on.”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 4

Smile, Hope, Silence, Appearance

“Wood is a gift from the world of nature to we undeserving men…One should be thankful for such gifts, take no more than we need, and waste none of that.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 36 (p. 517)

Men, World, Nature

“Another busy day! So let’s to business. The clock moves forward; wasted time is life defeated!”

Jack Vance book To Live Forever

Source: To Live Forever (1956), Chapter VIII, section 3

Life, Business, Time

“America, I'm gonna shoot straight with you, I think I've wasted your time. I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time. I apologize for that.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Massa Circus Takes the Air out of Glenn Beck
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1970982,00.html
Glenn Beck: 'I Think This Is the First Time I Have Wasted an Hour of Your Time'
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/fnc/glenn_beck_i_think_this_is_the_first_time_i_have_wasted_an_hour_of_your_time_154527.asp
after an interview with Rep. Eric Massa

Thinking, Time

“Nothing, absolutely nothing that can be tackled by the human digestive system is wasted in Naples.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

“The future is too good to waste on lies. And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting.”

Bowe Bergdahl (1986) American soldier captured by the Taliban in 2009 and released in 2014 as part of a prisoner swap

Last e-mail to parents (2009)

Life, Fools, Way, Idea

“If from the wilderness the righteous and honest John were actually to come who, clothed in skins and living on locusts and untouched by all the terrible mischief, were meanwhile to apply himself with a pure heart and in all seriousness to the investigation of truth and to offer the fruits thereof, what kind of reception would he have to expect from those businessmen of the chair, who are hired for State purposes and with wife and family have to live on philosophy, and whose watchword is, therefore, Primum vivere, deinde philosophari [first live and then philosophize]? These men have accordingly taken possession of the market and have already seen to it that here nothing is of value except what they allow; consequently merit exists only in so far as they and their mediocrity are pleased to acknowledge it. They thus have on a leading rein the attention of that small public, such as it is, that is concerned with philosophy. For on matters that do not promise, like the productions of poetry, amusement and entertainment but only instruction, and financially unprofitable instruction at that, that public will certainly not waste its time, effort, and energy, without first being thoroughly assured that such efforts will be richly rewarded. Now by virtue of its inherited belief that whoever lives by a business knows all about it, this public expects an assurance from the professional men who from professor’s chairs and in compendiums, journals, and literary periodicals, confidently behave as if they were the real masters of the subject. Accordingly, the public allows them to sample and select whatever is worth noting and what can be ignored. My poor John from the wilderness, how will you fare if, as is to be expected, what you bring is not drafted in accordance with the tacit convention of the gentlemen of the lucrative philosophy? They will regard you as one who has not entered in the spirit of the game and thus threatens to spoil the fun for all of them; consequently, they will regard you as their common enemy and antagonist. Now even if what you bring were the greatest masterpiece of the human mind, it could never find favor in their eyes. For it would not be drawn up ad normam conventionis [according to the current pattern]; and so it would not be such as to enable them to make it the subject of their lectures from the chair in order to make a living from it. It never occurs to a professor of philosophy to examine a new system that appears to see whether it is true; but he at once tests it merely to see whether it can be brought into harmony with the doctrines of the established religion, with government plans, and with the prevailing views of the times.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, pp. 160-161, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 148-149
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Men, Truth, Family, Religion

“Oh, woman, perfect woman! what distraction
Was meant to mankind when thou wast made a devil!
What an inviting hell invented.”

John Fletcher (1579–1625) English Jacobean playwright

Comedy of Monsieur Thomas (c. 1610–16; published 1639), Act III, scene 1.

Hell, Perfection

“[Charity] conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after time to bring children into the world. It merely says 'Increase and multiply: We are prepared to help you do this.' Whereas the great majority of mothers realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth. … Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Source: The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, Chapter 5, "The Cruelty of Charity"

Women, Children, Stupidity, World

“Know that coyness has a certain extent and if exceeded, shall turn to weakness; generosity has a certain extent and if exceeded, shall become wasting; economy has a certain extent and if exceeded, shall be stinginess; and courage has a certain extent, which if exceeded, becomes recklessness.”

Hasan al-Askari (846–874) Eleventh of the Twelve Imams

Nuzhat an-Nadhir fī Tanbīh al-Khawatir, p. 50-51
General

Courage

“The more logical and determined … critics will confess that they believe that the great mass of mankind is and of right ought to be condemned to a modern version of natural slavery. Hence there is not use wasting educational effort upon them. They should be given training as will be necessary to enable them to survive.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Education, Nature, Effort, Training

“Too much action with too little intent makes for wasteful exertion of energy and the confusion between movement and progress.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 120

“The main key to the economics of the postwar world is a simple truism — that the rate of accumulation is equal to the rate of production less the rate of consumption. This is the "Bathtub Theorem." Production may be likened to the flow of water from the faucet, consumption to the flow down the drain. The difference between these two flows is the rate at which the water in the bathtub - the total stockpile of all goods - is accumulating.
War drains the economic bathtub in a great waste of consumption. The first problem of reconstruction is to rebuild the stockpile. It can be rebuilt only by widening the gap between production and consumption, or, in the case of a single country, by importing more than is exported. It is difficult for a ravaged country to increase either its production or its net imports. Unless it can obtain outside help, therefore, it must suffer a drastic restriction of consumption. Frequently the only way consumption can be restricted is by inflation. Here, therefore, is the key to the most fundamental problems of reconstruction.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Preface
1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945

War, World, Way, Problem

“Reason teaches us that we cannot expect anything but more suffering, more treachery, more insults, and more slavery. Reason teaches us not to waste time hoping for the promised prosperity that will never come and never materialise… Reason teaches us to be united in will, united in thought, and united in purpose and that we might have strength to combat the prevailing evil in our Nation.”

Andrés Bonifacio (1863–1897) Filipino nationalist and revolutionary

Quoted in: Bryan C. Paraiso (2012) " Bonifacio reveals fervor in writings http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/315489/bonifacio-reveals-fervor-in-writings." Philippine Daily Inquirer. November 30, 2012.

Hope, Suffering, Evil, Time

“Brexit won’t be easy, but it can be made to work for everyone. The first step in making Brexit a success is accepting it, and discussing the topic in a grown up and constructive manner. I’m sick of the constant nastiness and negativity; is there any wonder that people have such little trust in politicians when time is wasted on vicious personal attacks instead of trying to work together to get the best deal for everyone.”

Jonathan Arnott (1981) British politician

It is time for our national conversation to move away from discussing whether Brexit will happen to a debate on how to make Brexit work for everyone in the UK http://www.jonathanarnott.co.uk/2017/02/it-is-time-for-our-national-conversation-to-move-away-from-discussing-whether-brexit-will-happen-to-a-debate-on-how-to-make-brexit-work-for-everyone-in-the-uk/ (February 13, 2017)

People, Time, Success, Personality

“The long sobs of
The violins
Of autumn
Lay waste my heart
With monotones
Of boredom.”

Paul Verlaine Chanson d'automne

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
Monotone.
"Chanson d'automne", line 1, from Poèmes saturniens (1866); Sorrell p. 24

Autumn, Heart

“The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’être offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 2, “Preparations for Departure” (p. 33)

Books

“Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Pain, World, Beauty, Way

“Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
'Cause another's rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flow'ry meads in May,
If she think not well of me,
What care I how fair she be?”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

George Wither, "The Lover's Resolution" http://www.bartleby.com/101/237.html. Misattributed

Thinking, Despair

“It is a waste of words to try to impute to the Creator democratic ideas or social virtues; or to think that one can move Him with weeping and wailing, and persuade Him with logic and legal quibbles. Nothing is so pointless as words.”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Pastor Jón's eulogy to Dr. Sýngmann
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

Idea, Thinking

“I have grown accustomed to the disrespect expressed by some of the participants for their colleagues in the other disciplines. "Why, Dan," ask the people in artificial intelligence, "do you waste your time conferring with those neuroscientists? They wave their hands about 'information processing' and worry about where it happens, and which neurotransmitters are involved, but they haven't a clue about the computational requirements of higher cognitive functions." "Why," ask the neuroscientists, "do you waste your time on the fantasies of artificial intelligence? They just invent whatever machinery they want, and say unpardonably ignorant things about the brain." The cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, are accused of concocting models with neither biological plausibility nor proven computational powers; the anthropologists wouldn't know a model if they saw one, and the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each other's laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created, in an arena bereft of both data and empirically testable theories. With so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still a mystery. All these charges are true, and more besides, but I have yet to encounter any idiots. Mostly the theorists I have drawn from strike me as very smart people – even brilliant people, with the arrogance and impatience that often comes with brilliance – but with limited perspectives and agendas, trying to make progress on the hard problems by taking whatever shortcuts they can see, while deploring other people's shortcuts. No one can keep all the problems and details clear, including me, and everyone has to mumble, guess and handwave about large parts of the problem.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

People, Intelligence, Problem, Time

“It was perhaps a bad moment to undertake an architectural guide to the City of London. There are, at the time of writing, still whole areas lying waste after bombing in the Second World War. A number of the City churches, also, are not yet repaired or restored. Yet the publication of this volume was much asked for; so I decided to undertake it in spite of these disadvantages.”

Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) German-born British scholar

The Buildings of England

War, World, Lying, Time

“Looking over such famous old books as Montmort's 'Analyse des jeux de hasard' or Moivre's 'Doctrine of Chances' one regrets that so much excellent mathematics should have been wasted on games most of which are wholly obsolete. Coriolus in his '[Théorie Mathématique des Effets du] Jeu de billard' (1835) fared better, for the game is still very much alive and its dynamical terrors unsubdued.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

"The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898)

Books, Game, Mathematics, Chance

“I'm singin' this borrowed tune I took from the Rolling Stones,
Alone in this empty room, too wasted to write my own.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Borrowed Tune
Song lyrics, Tonight's the Night (1975)

“Love is also disquiet, the brooding pleasures of doubt, midnights wasted by speculation, the frantic dance round the significance of the last thing she said, the need to see her to have life confirmed.”

Laurie Lee (1914–1997) British writer

Love, p. 57.
I Can't Stay Long (1975)

Love, Life, Pleasure, Dance

“At the most abstract level, the relation between urbanism and microelectronics is scalar (fractal). The coming computers are closer to miniature cities than to artificial brains, dominated by traffic problems (congestion), migration / communications, zoning issues (mixed use), the engineering potential of new materials, questions of dimensionality (3D solutions to density constraints), entropy or heat / waste dissipation (recycling / reversible computation), and disease control”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

new viruses "Implosion" https://web.archive.org/web/20121013194328/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/414/implosion (2011)

Disease, Communication, Question, Problem

“As we all know, the Lord is almighty – he knows all and sees far. And so, one day, he let forest fire burn a good swath of state land, laying waste to acres of the dry, pine forest around the town of Joensuu. The people did everything in their power to put a stop to his work, as they always did, but he burned the forest undeterred, just as far as it suited him. He had his own plans.”

Väinö Linna book The Unknown Soldier

Opening words, p. 1.
The Unknown Soldier

People

“The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 29
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

Life, Youth, Failure

“One of the things that most surprises me about my honourable Friend’s remarks is that he characterizes his proposal for state intervention in, and control of, industry as “innovation and a spirit of adventure” and condemns free private enterprise as “prosaic precedent”. This is a strange paradox. I would put it precisely the other way round. What he advocates is based on the “prosaic precedent” of many of our rivals who have to resort to wooing industry with artificial aids and have had remarkably little success at it. Recent events have shown that enterprising spirits still prefer our economic freedom to the restrictive swaddling clothes offered elsewhere. Possibly I am a romantic in this but I, for one, do not believe that our spirit of adventure is in need of artificial stimulation — nor do I believe that we can afford the wasteful application of our scarce resources which they would entail—we are neither desperate enough, nor rich enough, for such expedients to make economic sense. It is, of course, all the fashion today to cry in any commercial difficulty, “why doesn’t the Government do something about it.””

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

But I would rather go back to the old days when even the most modest attempt by Government to intervene in commerce and industry was rudely rebuffed.
March 27, 1968, page 213.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Way, Fashion, Sense, Freedom

“The problem with ideology is, if you've got an ideology, you've already got your mind made up. You know all the answers and that makes evidence irrelevant and arguments a waste of time. You tend to govern by assertion and attacks.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

At an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress, October 18, 2006[citation needed]
2000s

Problem, Time

“And what do ye say then? — That Spring long departed
Has brought forth no child to the softness and showers;
— That we slept and we dreamed through the Summer of flowers;
We dreamed of the Winter, and waking dead-hearted
Found Winter upon us and waste of dull hours.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Love is Enough (1872), Song III: It Grew Up Without Heeding

Dreams, Spring, Flowers, Winter

“Masters, I have to tell a tale of woe,
A tale of folly and of wasted life”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Introductory verse.
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70)
Context: Masters, I have to tell a tale of woe,
A tale of folly and of wasted life,
Hope against hope, the bitter dregs of strife,
Ending, where all things end, in death at last.

Life

“I am a little late getting around to it, but confession is good for the soul. I have sometimes voted to spend more taxpayer's money for worthy Federal projects in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while I vigorously opposed wasteful spending boondoggles in Oklahoma.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

1970s, Address to Congress (12 August 1974)
Context: I am a little late getting around to it, but confession is good for the soul. I have sometimes voted to spend more taxpayer's money for worthy Federal projects in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while I vigorously opposed wasteful spending boondoggles in Oklahoma. [Laughter]
Be that as it may, Mr. Speaker, you and I have always stood together against unwarranted cuts in national defense. This is no time to change that nonpartisan policy.

Money, Soul

“On your first appearance before the Court, do not waste your time and ours telling us so. We are likely to discover for ourselves that you are a novice but will think none the less of you for it. Every famous lawyer had his first day at our bar, and perhaps a sad one…. Be respectful, of course, but also be self-respectful, and neither disparage yourself nor flatter the Justices. We think well enough of ourselves already.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

Advocacy Before the Supreme Court: Suggestions for Effective Case Presentations, 37 A.B.A Journal 801 (1951)

Sadness, Justice, Thinking, Appearance

“That the emission of light must waste the sun, is not a difficulty that can be opposed to our hypothesis.”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

Source: Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works (1880), Ch.4 "Life and Works" quote from his paper "Nature and Construction of the Sun and Fixed Stars" (1795).
Context: That the emission of light must waste the sun, is not a difficulty that can be opposed to our hypothesis. Many of the operations of Nature are carried on in her great laboratory which we cannot comprehend. Perhaps the many telescopic comets may restore to the sun what is lost by the emission of light.<!-- p. 148

Light, Sun

“In other words, you must not waste a second of this deliciousness which for him was life and being a great poet. That you savor every, everything that happened. I want to get ripe.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

NOW interview (2004)
Context: The ripeness was a letter that John Keats wrote to his brother who emigrated to America describing what it was like to have a peach or piece of a peach in his mouth. And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it. Let it go through your palette. Let it lie on your tongue. Let it melt a little bit. Let it run from the corners. It's like describing the most incredible sex orgy. And then, you bite. But, it must be so ripe. It must be so delicious. In other words, you must not waste a second of this deliciousness which for him was life and being a great poet. That you savor every, everything that happened. I want to get ripe.

Life

“I do not think I have wasted words to no purpose: the maxim, "Sacrifice to the immortal gods according to thy means," I accept as applying not merely to burnt-offerings, but also to our praises addressed unto the gods.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)
Context: Inasmuch as it is my wish only to compose a hymn of thanksgiving in honour of the god, I have deemed it quite sufficient to discourse to the best of my ability concerning his nature. I do not think I have wasted words to no purpose: the maxim, "Sacrifice to the immortal gods according to thy means," I accept as applying not merely to burnt-offerings, but also to our praises addressed unto the gods. I pray for the third time, in return for this my good intention, the Sun lord of the universe to be propitious to me, and to bestow on me a virtuous life, a more perfect understanding, and a superhuman intellect, and a very easy release from the trammels of life at the time appointed: and after that release, an ascension up to himself, and an abiding place with him, if possible, for all time to come; or if that be too great a recompense for my past life, many and long-continued revolutions around his presence!

God, Thinking

“Yesterday was an utter waste. An artist, of whatever stripe, has only so many days, to write or paint or dance or whatever, and each one wasted is that much that will never be accomplished.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

20 February 2005
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2005

Dance, Painting

“Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.”

John Nash (1928–2015) American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate

Autobiographical essay (1994)

Thinking, Effort

“But what is history, Don Ferrante would often say, without politics? A guide who walks on and on with no one following to learn the road, so that his every step is wasted; just as politics without history is like a man who walks along without a guide.”

Alessandro Manzoni book The Betrothed

Ma cos'è mai la storia, diceva spesso don Ferrante, senza la politica? Una guida che cammina, cammina, con nessuno dietro che impari la strada, e per conseguenza butta via i suoi passi; come la politica senza la storia è uno che cammina senza guida.
Variant translation:
"But," said he often, "what is history without politics? a guide who conducts without teaching any one the way; as politics without history, is a man without a guide to conduct him."
Richard Bentley translation (1834)
Source: The Betrothed (1827; 1842), Ch. 27, p. 374

History, Learning

“Obscure they went through dreary shades, that led
Along the waste dominions of the dead.”
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram, Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.

Virgil book Aeneid

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book VI, Lines 268–269 (tr. John Dryden)

Dead

“Beautiful ladies in danger. Danger all around the world. But I will protect them, because I am Chris de Burgh! Beautiful ladies in emergency situations. Beautiful ladies are lovely but sometimes they don't take care
They're too busy with their makeup and combing their lovely hairTo take basic safety precautions But I will protect them I will save the pretty onesWith their smiles and their beautiful eyesBut let the ugly ones dieI have no place for them in my new world orderI won't waste my seed on hideous trollsKill kill kill kill kill the trolls hunt them down there shall be no clemencyKill kill kill kill kill the trollsLook under the bridges that's where they hideThat's where they hideAnd beauty shall be my bride.”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Lyrics

Love, World, Smile, Beauty

“The gift of life is too great to waste”

David Gemmell book Quest for Lost Heroes

Source: Drenai series, Quest for Lost Heroes, Ch. 1
Context: By my lights, my son, you are a young man. [... ] there should be love in your life. Am I at fault in my thinking?''Not at fault, Senior Brother. I loved once, and in truth I could love again. But the pain of loss was too much for me. I would rather live alone than suffer for it.''Then you are here to hide, Charreos, and it is not a good reason. The gift of life is too great to waste in such a fashion...

Life

“That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those… of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.”

Thornton Wilder Our Town

"Simon Stimson"
Our Town (1938)
Context: That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

Feeling, Passion, Time

“Force, unregulated or ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the void, like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the air, they recoil, and bruise itself.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. I : Apprentice, The Twelve-Inch Rule and Common Gavel, p. 1
Context: Force, unregulated or ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the void, like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the air, they recoil, and bruise itself. It is destruction and ruin. It is the volcano, the earthquake, the cyclone; — not growth and progress. It is Polyphemus blinded, striking at random, and falling headlong among the sharp rocks by the impetus of his own blows.

Science

“There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

Death, Memory

“The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste.”

Howard Thurman (1899–1981) American writer

The Search For Common Ground : An Inquiry Into The Basis Of Man's Experience Of Community (1971), p. 6
Context: In the conflicts between man and man, between group and group, between nation and nation, the loneliness of the seeker for community is sometimes unendurable. The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste. Always he must know that the contradictions of life are not final or ultimate; he must distinguish between failure and a many-sided awareness so that he will not mistake conformity for harmony, uniformity for synthesis. He will know that for all men to be alike is the death of life in man, and yet perceive harmony that transcends all diversities and in which diversity finds its richness and significance.

Life, World, Feeling, Nature

Quotes about wasting page 13

Quotes about wasting
page 13