We cannot help ourselves.We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.You are forced on exertion.You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.

-Austen,Jane
  Of the difference between women and men. Persuasion, ch.23.

When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.

-DeVoto, Bernard
The Hour.

Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour.

-Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
  'The Children's Hour', stanza1.

Actually, I am a golfer. That is my real occupation. I never was an actor; ask anybody, particularly the critics.

-Mature,Victor
Attributed.

Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult.

-Olivier, Laurence Kerr, Baron
  Quoted in Time, 3  Jul.

Sport, rightly conceived, is an occupation carried out by the whole man. It renders the body a more perfect instrument of the soul and at the same time makes the soul itself a finer instrument of the whole man in seeking forTruth and in transmitting it to others. In this way it helps a man to reach that End to which all other ends are subordinate, the service and the greater glory of his Creator.

-Pius XII real name Eugenio Pacelli
  Speech to the Central School of Sports of the USA, 29 Jul.

Every occupation, unless it employs the whole mind and satisfies the human creative instinct, is to some extent absurd; and abouttheadvertising business what I chiefly disliked was not so much the work I did as its general atmosphere of unreality.We dealt in fairy-goldöin fugitive dreams and illusions.

-Quennell, Sir Peter Courtney
  The Marble Foot: an Autobiography,1905^1938, p.227.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  Parents and Children.

They have no education, no taste for reading, no housewifery, nor, indeed, any earthly occupation but that ofdressingtheirhair, andadorningtheirbodies.Theyhate walking, and would never go abroad, if they were not stimulated by the vanityof being seen† Nothing can be more parsimonious than the economy of these people. They live upon soup and bouille, fish and salad.

-Smollett,Tobias George
  Of the nobility of Boulogne.Travels through France and Italy.