Quotes About Work

Days off are one of the great joys of an ordinary working life, perhaps

Another thing done, is another thing done!

An average horse can produce only about half a horsepower for any extended period.

Finally, David Swensen has made it fun to work on investing for Yale—recruiting a team of exceptionally talented Yale graduates

If you think that you can hide what your interests are, what your prurient interests are, what your noble interests are, what your fascinations are, if you think you can hide that in your work as a film director, you're nuts.

DO what you LOVE what you DO !

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers

There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.

Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn't have capitalism anymore.

Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it's better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends' complex polyamorous love affairs.

As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn't have time to do much else.

This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work not so much as wealth-creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self-abnegation, a kind of secular hair-shirt, a sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumerist toys.

Being forced to pretend to work just for the sake of working is an indignity, since the demand is perceived—rightly—as the pure exercise of power for its own sake.

The "public" does not work—a sentence like "most of the American public works in the service industry" would never appear in a magazine or paper, and if a journalist were to attempt to write such a sentence, her editor would certainly change it to something else. It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work:

There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even "productive work" but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They're just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it's just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly.

The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead.

Most people's sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living. Most people hate their jobs. We might refer to this as "the paradox of modern work.

We have created societies where much of the population, trapped in useless employment, have come to resent and despise equally those who do the most useful work in society, and those who do no paid work at all.

Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one's adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed

No matter how much workers may have been conditioned in time discipline by primary schooling, they will see the demand to work continually at a steady pace for eight hours a day regardless of what there is to do as defying all common sense—and the pretend make-work they are instructed to perform as absolutely infuriating.27

How can you have dignity in labor if you personally believe your job shouldn't really exist?