Quotes About Work

When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.

I love doing what I do.

The stories I'm interested in are challenging ones, and maybe that requires a little bit more of you. I love my job and I want to earn the right to do it every single day.

I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.

No man can be successful, unless he first loves his work.

I have very high standards for every part of life - my work, my relationships, food, love. I can't just pretend.

I spend too much time on the Internet. But I do love knitting. Actually, I do more knitting when I'm working.

I certainly don't believe in love at first sight. I definitely believe in a lot of chemistry and lust at first sight. I think that love is something that takes work.

I could have gone on to be an engineer full time, except that there was more demand for my playing. But the love of working the board never leaves you.

Love works in a circle, for the beloved moves the lover by stamping a likeness, and the lover then goes out to hold the beloved inreality. Who first was the beginning now becomes the end of motion.

To business that we love we rise betime, and go to't with delight.

The cobbler's children go barefoot

back (thank god for office accessorizing, the last playground of the reluctant adult).

Our most important work is love.

But if we stop short of the personal work—if we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can reconstruct the gospel without addressing our divided souls, then we carry the germ of white supremacy with us into our most noble efforts to rid this world's systems of racism. Nothing is uglier than the inevitable explosion when white people try to participate in antiracist work without addressing their own hidden wound. Each of us has to do our own soul work.

I'm a very analytical person, a somewhat introspective person that's the nature of the work I do.

Somewhat magically, when we do feel our work has meaning, it gives us a turbo boost of confidence to step up and have impact.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the "pitiful ideology" holding that "human beings are created for happiness" was an ideology "done in by the first blow of the work assigner's cudgel.

Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance

Prosaically, such sacrifice—work—is delay of gratification, but that's a very mundane phrase to describe something of such profound significance. The discovery that gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and, with it, causality (at least the causal force of voluntary human action). Long ago, in the dim mists of time, we began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with.

No one finds a match so perfect that the need for continued attention and work vanishes (and, besides, if you found the perfect person, he or she would run away from ever-so-imperfect you in justifiable horror).

because to work means to sacrifice the hypothetical delights of the present for the potential improvement of what lies ahead.

You answer because some hyper-ambitious legal associate in New York would be happy to answer, if you don't—and that's why the market defines the work.

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps. The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man. —William Blake, from "Proverbs of Hell," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell