Quotes about Work

Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One's

An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

Do we, for instance, carry on our work in our nest or do we only reside and get our mail there? Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever.

The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

I have, to fill my mind and occupy my hands, the daily rounds of my economy. I have food to harvest and preserve in the summer and fall, firewood to gather and saw up and split in the fall and winter, the garden to prepare and plant in the spring. I have clothes and bedclothes to wash, and myself to keep clean and presentable. I have the endless little jobs of housekeeping and repair... I have books to read, and much to sit and watch.

As Walter Shewring rightly said, both "the plowman and the potter have a cosmic function." And bad art in any trade dishonors and damages Creation.

People are making careful, comely, dignified work of the essential tasks defined by modern values as "drudgery." And because they have thought of the well-being of all the people, all are busy. There is a use for everyone. The Amish do not have the abandoned children, cast-off old people, criminals, indigents, and vagrants whom we have "freed from drudgery." And

The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.

Se poate întâmpla ca, atunci când nu mai È™tim ce s? facem, s? fi ajuns la adev?rata noastr? munc?, iar când nu mai È™tim pe ce cale s? o lu?m, s? fi început adev?rata noastr? c?l?torie.

But the safe competence of human work extends no further, ever, than our ability to think and love at the same time.