Quotes About Work

Perfectionism stops people from completing their work, yes—but even worse, it often stops people from beginning their work.

It's okay if your work is fun for you, is what I'm saying. It's also okay if your work is healing for you, or fascinating for you, or redemptive for you, or if it's maybe just a hobby that keeps you from going crazy. It's even okay if your work is totally frivolous. That's allowed. It's all allowed.

Begin anywhere. Preferably right now. And if greatness should ever accidentally stumble upon you, let it catch you hard at work. Hard at work, and sane.

Let people have their opinions. More than that—let people be in love with their opinions, just as you and I are in love with ours. But never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else's blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work. And always remember that people's judgments about you are none of your business. Lastly

The rewards had to come from the joy of puzzling out the work itself, and from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it.

What I'm saying is this: If my plan is to sit around waiting for another such unadulterated and impassioned creative visitation, I may be waiting for a very long time. So I don't sit around waiting to write until my genius decides to pay me a visit. If anything, I have come to believe that my genius spends a lot of time waiting around for me—waiting to see if I'm truly serious about this line of work.

Inspiration is always trying to work with me. So I sit there and I work, too. That's the deal. I trust it; it trusts me.

I work steadily, and I always thank the process.

Hesitantly, she admitted that perhaps she wanted to be a writer. He smiled at the girl with infinite compassion and asked, "Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.

my deep and lifelong conviction that the results of my work don't have much to do with me. I can only be in charge of producing the work itself.

Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.

I was not built only to labor, and then to sleep, and then to labor again the next day--with no pleasure or excitement. There had to be more to life than toil and travail.

Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that's how it gets done. Most of it is not like fairy dust in the least.

There's no dishonor in having a job. What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence.

try saying this: "I enjoy my creativity." And when you say it, be sure to actually mean it. For one thing, it will freak people out. I believe that enjoying your work with all your heart is the only truly subversive position left to take as a creative person these days. It's such a gangster move, because hardly anybody ever dares to speak of creative enjoyment aloud, for fear of not being taken seriously as an artist. So say it. Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.

Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do nothing.

Intracranial jewelry-making! What a cool job! That's basically what we all do--all of us who spend our days making and doing interesting things for no particularly rational reason.

O trabalho quer ser feito, e quer ser feito através de você.

What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it's sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life. The more lightly you can pass that time, the brighter your existence becomes.

there is a profound sense of honor to be found in looking after yourself, and that honor will resonate powerfully in your work; it will make your work stronger.

So the question is not so much "What are you passionate about?" The question is "What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?

how I choose to handle myself as a writer is entirely my own choice. I can make my creativity into a killing field, or I can make it into a really interesting cabinet of curiosities. I can even make it into an act of prayer. My ultimate choice, then, is to always approach my work from a place of stubborn gladness.

But I don't sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things for as long as we live, and because I enjoy making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

she admitted that perhaps she wanted to be a writer. He smiled at the girl with infinite compassion and asked, "Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.