Quotes about Work

God made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work?

If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them

There are wealthy gentlemen in En-gland who drive four-horse passenger coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

He would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

All labor has dignity.

no labor is really menial unless you're not getting adequate wages.

Very few people will rise to the heights of genius in the arts and the sciences; very few collectively will rise to certain professions. Most of us will have to be content to work in the fields and in the factories and on the streets. But we must see the dignity of all labor.

But is it coincidence? Are there not subtle forces at work of which we know little?

It is brutal work, though not more brutal than that which goes onto supply every dinner-table in the country (Life on a Greenland Whaler, an article published in The Strand Magazine in january 1897)

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Look, Gail. Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life. Your strength? Your work. He tossed the branch aside. The material the earth offers you and what you make of it . . .