Quotes
Quotes about Work
Men's minds are as variant as their faces. Where the motives of their actions are pure, the operation of the former is no more to be imputed to them as a crime, than the appearance of the latter; for both, being the work of nature, are alike unavoidable.
In the 1930s people went to see films not just to be entertained or to escape the dreariness of their workaday lives but to gain an education, to see the world, to learn table manners and interior decoration, how to dress, kiss, to laugh and cry, how to react to tragedy and happiness, how to be brave, evil and good.
It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter-century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work.
Work is a four-letter word.
I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific.'
The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image.
When sleep leaves the body like smoke and man, sated with secrets, drives the overworked nag of quarrel out of its stall, then the fire-breathing union begins anew . . .
If there's a power above us, (and that there is all nature cries aloud Through all her works) he must delight in virtue.
Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of God we call him a sportsman.
That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?
It all changed when I realized I'm not the only one on the planet who's scared. Everyone else is, too. I started asking people, "Are you scared, too?" "You bet your sweet life I am." "Aha, so that's the way it is for you, too." We were all in the same boat. That's probably what is so effective at our workshops. When I ask, "Who else feels like this?" the whole room of hands goes up. People realize they are not the only one who feels that way.
Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
'Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.' Under the influence of this pestilent morality, I am forever letting tomorrow's work slop backwards into today's, and doing painfully and nervously today what I could do quickly and easily tomorrow.
I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.
A late lark twitters from the quiet skies: And from the west, Where the sun, his day's work ended, Lingers as in content, There falls on the old, gray city An influence luminous and serene, A shining peace.
Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.
Ay, these look like the workmanship of heaven; This is the porcelain clay of human kind, And therefore cast into these noble moulds.
Nothing to do but work, Nothing to eat but food, Nothing to wear out but clothes, To keep one from going nude.
Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in almost every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself, more or less, with all our pleasures.
Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in almost every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself, more or less, with all our pleasures.
A great work is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.
