Quotes About Work

It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.

In his work shirt and underpants, he looked powerful but also cartoonish, like a bear dressed up for a job interview.

I'm sad to be finishing school. I liked being in college. It was respectable to be a student. You get discount admissions all over town, and it makes you work.

Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you were old enough to work, and money was the only thing that mattered.

My job, always, was to hand him tools as he called for them and to hold the worklight, a bare bulb in an aluminum cage. It might have been different had I cared what a piston was, or were I interested in the proper consistency of cement. As it was, I never asked, and he never offered. Rather, I'd just stand there, my arm outstretched like a lawn jockey's.

But it isn't like real work. The travel can occasionally be taxing, but anyone can turn pages and read out loud. What takes time are the postshow book signings—my fault because I talk too much.

One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.

One of the things that happens when you're going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it's in that sense that "tortured" souls sometimes produce great work.

You'll never have enough time to work on a paid client project.

Clients hire people, not design robots

But the corner is relentless and certain. It can't be underestimated. It can't be appeased with pretense or melodrama or the easy fatalism of youth. It waits. It works. It finishes whatever it begins in its own time, in its own way.

Though I am not rich, I am not absolutely poor. . . . I am working now less for myself than for those around me. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, MAY 6, 1868

Douglass much preferred to employ passages such as John 5:17, when Jesus is condemned to death because he broke the law and labored on the Sabbath: "My father worketh, said the Savior, and I also work."26

A true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place.

To eat and drink, and be happy in one's toil: this is the grace of God.

Sometimes I wonder how often we've been so shielded from troubles that we remain blind to the power of God at work around us.

People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it-those are the real heros.

The world has too few modest fry cooks and far too many self-important professors.

They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs.

Nous, les Arabes, ne sommes pas paresseux. Nous prenons seulement le temps de vivre. Ce qui n'est pas le cas des Occidentaux. Pour eux, le temps, c'est de l'argent. Pour nous, le temps ça n'a pas de prix. Un verre de thé suffit à notre bonheur, alors qu'aucun bonheur ne leur suffit. Toute la différence est là.

The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.

Some people might be born with a predisposition to better judgment, but the rest of us, I believe, have to grow wiser by hard work.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

I'm serious. I don't know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I'm not in the business of World Domination.