quotations about work
It is useless work that darkens the heart.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Have you beheld a man skillful in his work? Before kings is where he will station himself; he will not station himself before commonplace men.
SOLOMON
Proverbs 22:29
Work is the activity undertaken with our hands which gives objectivity to the world.
KEITH GRINT
The Sociology of Work
Call no work low that is honest;
Honest toil never degrades.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Workers"
When master and workmen unite the work is soon done.
WAKATAUKI
attributed, Day's Collacon
Inter-cubicle friendship is every bit as good for your health and your output as an ergonomically correct ball chair. Even in our furiously multi-tasking world, work should still come with a good dose of play. And, okay, maybe some free pretzels too.
KATIE UNDERWOOD
"Why developing friendships at work is so important", Canadian Business, January 27, 2016
Work alone isn't enough for me and mine;
we know how to break our backs, but the great dream
Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.
CESARE PAVESE
"Ancestors"
True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.
HERMAN MELVILLE
letter to Catherine G. Lansing, September 5, 1877
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
L. P. JACKS
Education Through Recreation
What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.
KARL MARX
Value, Price, and Profit
No matter how humble your work may seem, do it in the spirit of an artist, of a master. In this way you lift it out of commonness and rob it of what would otherwise be drudgery.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
He Can Who Thinks He Can
If every man should work at that for which nature fitted him, the cows would be well tended.
FLORIAN
attributed, Day's Collacon
The truth is, any of us in a position to choose and chase work out of love do so from a place of relative privilege. Overwhelmingly, work in the world is done for income, and income alone, and love doesn't even get a look-in.
SIMON CASTLES
"Do what you love mantra devalues hard work", The Age, February 9, 2016
No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
Diaries and Letters
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction -- a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
Playing games at work is a time-honored tradition. Windows computers come with Minesweeper and Solitaire for a reason, you know. But getting caught by the boss slacking off on company time isn't terribly good for your paycheck. If you're gaming on the clock, you need to be playing something that lets you cover your tracks.
K. THOR JENSEN
"The best games to secretly play at work", Geek, February 5, 2016
The chances of a man's succeeding who does not love his work are very small. For all success costs labor.
FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP
Success: A Course in Moral Instruction
A woman's work is never done.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
Lust
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
THOMAS EDISON
attributed, The Great Book of Best Quotes of All Time