It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities -- life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.
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The great men among the ancients understood very well how to reconcile manual labour with affairs of state, and thought it no lessening to their dignity to make the one the recreation to the other. That indeed which seems most generally to have employed and diverted their spare hours, was agriculture. Gideon among the Jews was taken from threshing, as well as Cincinnatus amongst the Romans from the plough, to command the armies of their countries...and, as I remember, Cyrus thought gardening so little beneath the dignity and grandeur of a throne, that he showed Xenophon a large field of fruit trees all of his own planting . . . Delving, planting, inoculating, or any the like profitable employments would be no less a diversion than any of the idle sports in fashion, if men could be brought to delight in them.
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A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.
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The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. If he loves, it is not to give himself, to blend in fecund union with another being, but to meditate on his love. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.
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Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.
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The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.
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The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return the better to thinking.
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Those who can least bear a jest upon themselves, will be most diverted with one passed on others.
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It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities-life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.
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Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
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No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.
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