What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.
~ Barbara Ehrenreich
Joni Mitchell on Art
“Work is meant to be seen.”
~ Joni Mitchell / New Yorker, October 16th 2019
Janan Ganesh on Happiness
It takes minimal life experience to know that happiness comes from a small number of disproportionately important things. Perhaps as few as two. One is a fulfilling job. The other is a vital private life, which could mean, according to taste, devotion to one person or what George Michael hailed as “fast love”.
~ Janan Ganesh / FT, February 7 2020
Edward Lucas on Flow
But saving my mental energies helps me achieve the day’s greatest pleasure: periods of intense, unbroken concentration.
~ Edward Lucas / Times, February 03, 2020
Brian Cox on the Long Haul
‘…It’s the long haul for you. You’ve got to understand that. You will have moderate success in your career. But it is the long haul that counts.’ And he was absolutely right.
~ Brian Cox / Financial Times, 17th January 2020
Albert Camus on Poverty
“What could a man want that is better than poverty? I do not say misery, any more than I mean the work without hope of the modern proletarian. But I do not see that one could desire more than poverty with an active leisure.”
~ Albert Camus
Seneca on Bustle
“For love of bustle is not industry, – it is only the restlessness of a hunted mind”
~ Seneca
Robert Harris on Writing
“It’s a profession, a job,” he says. “There’s a terrible preciousness about writing. I think that if you write, you’ve just got to get on and write.”
~ Robert Harris / Financial Times, 20th December 2019
Seneca on Work
“Nothing is so certain as that the evils of idleness can be shaken off by hard work.”
~ Seneca
Paul Theroux on Being a Writer
And what was it that I most liked about my work? That I had no boss, no employees, no rivals, no competitors—the freedom of being a writer? That it was a way of dealing with my life, transforming my experiences, finding ways to understand it—recording life’s joys, making its tribulations bearable, and also, in writing, easing the passage of time? Making a living this way, my own way, self-employed—that was something to like.
Paul Theroux / On the Plain of Snakes
Antonio Pierro on Routines
Three meals a day. Work hard. Keep yourself clean. Get enough sleep. What else is there?
~ Antonio Pierro
Tsunetomo Yamamoto on the Shortness of Life
“Human life is truly a short affair. It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.”
~ / Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
Aaron Copland on Art
“The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.”
~ Aaron Copland
Gore Vidal on Boredom
“I have thrown away a number of successful careers out of boredom.”
~ Gore Vidal
Simon Kuper on Ageing
“But ideally, after ambition has faded, you love your trade for its own sake.”
~ Simon Kuper / Financial Times, 10th October, 2019
Tim Kreider on Work
“The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.”
~ Tim Kreider
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/
James Salter on Being Interested
“I am unhappy writing something I am not terrifically interested in.”
~ James Salter
Jim Harrison on Work
“Eventually everyone knows if you did the job or not.”
~ Jim Harrison
Ernest Hemingway on Juice
“As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
Jim Harrison on Grandiosity
“I had to consciously subdue my more grandiose impulses.”
~ Jim Harrison
Gary Snyder on Work
“The goal of living is not to consider work work, but to consider it your life and your play.”
~ Gary Snyder
David Brooks on Work
Furthermore, living a great life is more important than producing great work. A life devoted to one thing is a stunted life, while a pluralistic life is an abundant one.
~ David Brooks / New York Times, 29 July 2019
Benjamin Franklin on Work
God gives all things to industry.
~ Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin on Diligence
Diligence is the mother of good luck.
~ Benjamin Franklin
Al Burian on Work
“I was, and still am, happiest when I was doing a little bit of everything, and not taking any of it too seriously.”
~ Al Burian / Burn Collector
(Courtesy of Tim Kreider.)
https://humanparts.medium.com/what-would-your-teenaged-self-think-of-you-f2ce0c351e55
Tim Kreider on Vocations
“Anyone who makes the mistake of turning their passion into a vocation gets to watch it turn, like gold transmuting into lead, into a job.”
~ Tim Kreider
Andrei Tarkovsky on Work
“The great thing is to be free in your work. Of course it’s important to print or exhibit, but if that’s not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all—being able to work without asking anybody’s permission.”
~ Andrei Tarkovsky
Doris Lessing on Work
“What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.”
~ Doris Lessing
Stephen Hawking on Work
“Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.”
~ Stephen Hawking
Seamus Heaney on Work
“Book learning is the thing.
You’re a lucky man.
No stock to feed, no milking times, no tillage
Nor blisters on your hand nor weather-worries”
~ Seamus Heaney
Philip Larkin on Work
“Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?”
~ Philip Larkin
Geoffrey Chaucer on Time
“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”
~ Geoffrey Chaucer