Quotes About Work

When I ply the cutlass and make the equivalent of sixpence, idiot conscience applauds me. But if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds by writing, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted. No, to come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush. To change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, that makes for a quiet conscience.

Slaughtering swine, he writes, is repetitive, brutish work..... Five thousand quit and five thousand are hired every year. You ear people say, 'They don't kill pigs in the plant, they kill people.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

That was something they taught you in anxiety therapy- the thoughts may come, but you don't have to chase them all. It was sort of the opposite of good detective work, in which you had to follow every lead.

Many large corporations are actually modeled on hell,' Brother Frank added. 'The policies and organization are almost idential. Hell, of course, is much worse.

Leo approved of poets, generally, but it was very important not to let them get started on the subject of their work if you wanted to continue enjoying poetry.

I live alone, Knud said, and I work alone, but I am never truly alone. I do my ancestor's work. I live the entire history of my country and people.

But I was fuelled by the power of confusion and panic, which, like I said is always ready and waiting to get to work.

He silently gave thanks to the wealthy builders of this country pile who worked very hard to make sure they never had to see other people doing work.

She smiled. I know, this is a place where one employs nothing but aristocrats for the lousiest kinds of jobs. They're all aristocrats, that's true, said Wyatt, because they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job--only lousy men who don't care to do it.

Toil, comrade," he said, "is the highest aim of our lives. Who does not toil, shall not eat." The book was filled. The official applied his rubber stamp to the last page. The stamp bore a globe overshadowed by a crossed sickle and hammer.

The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad—a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros

Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods.

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence.

Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people." (578)

I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standardsand I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may perhaps stand at the beginning of one

Anyone else would have taken a job in an

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why. You're opening yourself up, Roark, for each and every one of them. But I never notice the people in the streets.

What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.

People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshiped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent;

there's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value.

before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people.

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others.