Quotes About Work

I don't want to deny myself the pleasure of bodily involvement in my work, for that pleasure seems to me to be the sign of an indispensable integrity.

The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.

I would be back in my garden all the time, working or just looking….I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.

We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.

Therefore, be patient. Such pleasure as there is, is here, now. Take pleasure as it comes. Take work as it comes. The end may never come, or when it does it may be the wrong end.

That computers are expected to become as common as TV sets in "the future" does not impress me or matter to me. I do not own a TV set. I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

of all bad motives none may be worse or more hopeless than fear. Nobody, I think, has ever done good work because of fear. Good work is done by knowing how and by love. Love requires faith, courage, patience, and steadiness, none of which can come from fear.

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn't know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead.

He is long past sleep now. His mind has begun to work on the agenda that it sets for itself, and he knows that he will not be able to stop it.

The healing that is ours and nature's will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.

How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? And that question is made legitimate by another: How have men improved themselves by submitting to it? The answer is that men have not, and women cannot, improve themselves by submitting to it.

Bewildered in our timely dwelling place, Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.

The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carryout meals.

Standing in the stanchion barn while the cows are being milked, I am impressed by how quietly the work is done. No voice is raised. There is never a sudden or violent motion. Although the work is quickly done, no one rushes. And finally comes the realization that the room is quiet because it is orderly:

The Georgians were not noted for their kindness to animals and children. Many children were forced to work in the mills, scale chimneys, beg on the streets or live by prostitution from the age of ten or less

But some words to men and women, boys and girls alike: The quality of the work must merit the readers' time and money. Do it for yourself, but make yourself a member of your own audience. There is no other way to evaluate your own progress.

Explanations of the stability of technologies must take account of the social relations of work as

We have worked all day to tidy the mess you have made.

was thrilled by the manner in which the American worked his ship. With his

If you will look about you (which most people won't do), says Sergeant Cuff, you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business.

But compare the hardest day's work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do.

Fancy and Imagination, Grace and Beauty, all those qualities which are to the work of Art what scent and colour are to the flower, can only grow towards heaven by taking root in earth.

Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing, he said. All people are good except those who are idle.

coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.