Quotes
Quotes about Work
As against having beautiful workshops, studios, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
Every man is the son of his own works.
I'm sometimes asked "Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?" I answer: "I am working at the roots." -George T. Angell, reformer (1823-1909)
Just as appetite comes by eating so work brings inspiration.
To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." - H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.
