“I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.”
Topic
work
981 quotes
Quotes, most loved first
“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”
“One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.”
“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”
“A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”
“Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.”
“The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.”
“You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.”
“I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.”
“Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.”
“Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it, you are lost.”
“The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.”
“Motivation is everything. You can do the work of two people, but you can't be two people. Instead, you have to inspire the next guy down the line and get him to inspire his people.”
“The productivity now at universities is terrible. Tenure is a terrible idea. It keeps them around forever and they don't have to work hard.”
“No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.”
“All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride.”
“The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.”
“Now this relaxation of the mind from work consists on playful words or deeds. Therefore it becomes a wise and virtuous man to have recourse to such things at times.”
“Will it, and set to work briskly.”
“We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.”
“So there's no such thing as work-life balance. There's work, and there's life, and there's no balance.”
“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
“What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!”
“A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.”