Quotes About Work

I do not think of myself as having arrived at any degree of achievement commensurate with my potential talent and capacity for work. I am just one among the many who have tried to approximate some measure of integrity in a world that is a sorry bewilderment of wretchedness and affluence.

This peculiar method of work, paradoxically enough, saved me. Once I was sure that, as usual, I should be able to show the identity of all human destiny ... I found myself free to make the characters act, to create situations.

There is nothing inherently fair about equalizing incomes. If the government penalizes you for working harder than somebody else, that is unfair. If you save your money but retire with the same pension as a free-spending neighbor, that is also unfair.

capitalism as an economic and social system that makes people unhappy by making them into part of a human machine in which humanity is expunged and only productivity remains.

As one management scholar puts it, "Employees who do not successfully traverse this period experience ongoing identity instability; they are cognitively and emotionally consumed by the loss, stagnating in their inability to let go of the old self and/or to embrace the new and changed work self."[7

One of the nastiest and most virulent addictions I have seen is workaholism

The rewards of that productivity give way to a fear of falling behind as an impetus to keep running. Soon enough, the work crowds out relationships and outside activities.

With little else, work is all that is left to the workaholic, reinforcing the cycle.

The rest of this book, therefore, is dedicated to helping you make the jump. First, I will show you the three forces holding you back, and how to remove them. They are your addiction to work and success, your attachment to worldly rewards, and your fear of decline.

To be a happy warrior you must work to be a genuinely happy person.

Economists consistently find that our marginal productivity tanks with work hours beyond eight or ten per day.

What all addictions have in common is that they involve an unhealthy relationship with something unworthy of human love, be it booze, gambling, applause, or—yes—work.

But to be constantly noticed, to achieve specialness, doesn't come cheap. Apart from a few reality TV stars and accidental celebrities, success is brutal work and takes sacrifices.

2. DO YOUR CORE JOB

And so it is when we professionally self-objectify: Our work is our medium, which is our message. We love the image of ourselves as successful, not ourselves in true life. But you are not your job, and I (as I have to remind myself) am not mine.

Love and friendships are enormously time-consuming, it's true. They crowd out all kinds of other things, like . . . well, let's be honest: for many readers of this book, they mostly crowd out work. If that's the case for you, and it's what is holding back the proper development of romance, parenting, and real friendships, you have your priorities unbalanced.

But at the same time, a bloated welfare state that nudges middle-class citizens away from the labor force is moving our society away from the dignity of earned success.

I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the streets and drifts across the dun-colored houses…. What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?

Yeah, I could go rock on the back porch and do crossword puzzles - but I've got six kids, ages 9 to 16, and someone in the family should work. That's me.

My pub was full of get-rich-quick schemes that never worked - scams, pyramid schemes. People trying to find a way to get themselves out of a rut.

I come home from work, and depending on the day or depending on what was going on, if I needed to adjust, I'd just meditate or play guitar or watch some 'Monty Python.'

I know not how it is: there are some businesses for which dullness seems to be a qualification.

I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.

I think it's a mistake for the American public to constantly be told that if you work for an oil company or you work for a bank, that automatically makes you bad. I think a lot of these people are very qualified people who are patriots. They're going to want to help the country.