Quotes About Work

What were we saying to the country, to our young people, when we lowered capital gains taxes and raised taxes on those who earned their living by working?," asked Joseph Stiglitz: "That it is far better to make your living by speculation than by any other means."39

Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes. What makes one a member of the noble proletariat is not work per se, but unpretentiousness, humility, and the rest of the qualities that our punditry claims to spy in the red states that voted for George W. Bush.

Sometimes, when my wife and I were going out to dinner, I would take my laptop with me and work in the car, so as to take advantage of the half hour going and coming.

Be the business never so painful, you may have it done for money.

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil

Only a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walkWith an old horse that stumbles and nodsHalf asleep as they stalk.Only thin smoke without flameFrom the heaps of couch grass:Yet this will go onward the sameThough dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wightCome whispering by;War's annals will cloud into nightEre their story die.

She sang the Song of the Shirt.

Zen art makes one aware of the work of art itself.

Don't be led away to think this part of the world important and that unimportant. Every corner of the world is important. No man knows whether this part or that is most so, but every man may do some honest work in his own corner.

If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God

It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquillity and occupation which give happiness.

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.

That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.

I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.

I've worked with many directors, good ones and bad ones. So if I have a chance to work the good ones, I better put myself in their hands, and trust them, because that's my big opportunity to be different, and to be better than usual.

I figured out, I guess, that the job just makes me happy if it's not number one. So if it all works, great. If it doesn't, I still go home, look at my kids, and I have a big smile on my face.

But what could I say to her? That I'm drawn to those old buildings and junk because (voice beginning to seethe) . . . because they take me into a world (the seething builds) . . . a world that is the exact opposite of the one (voice seething to a pitch) . . . the one I'm doomed by my own weakness and fear to live in (uncontrollable, meta-maniacal seething) . . . to live in during my weeks, my months, my years and years of work . . . work . . . work?

Some speculative minds have faith that we are en route to a utopia where people are not mainly absorbed in a job that is killing them or despondent because they do not have a killing job.

Rushing had become so much of a habit that I was amazed at the amount of concentration it took to work slowly on purpose.

Why would I need someone to make sure I do my job correctly?" answered the Japanese worker. "That's my job.

Our culture does not recognize the value of being process oriented, even though we see so much evidence for it in the work produced by countries that do.