Quotes about work
page 31

“For his heart was in his work, and the heart
Giveth grace unto every Art.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Building of the Ship

Source: The Building of the Ship (1849), Line 7.
Source: Hiawatha: The Story and Song

“But then Froi looked back to where his work lay unfinished and it made him sad because there had been something about the touch of earth in his hands that made him feel worthwhile.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Sadness, Feeling

“Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Stupidity, Idea, Reading

“While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

“Christ did not die to make good works merely possible or to produce a half-hearted pursuit. He died to produce in us a passion for good deeds. Christian purity is not the mere avoidance of evil, but the pursuit of good.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: The Passion of Jesus Christ

Passion, Evil, Heart, Christ

“That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

Nature, Reality

“Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.”

Calvin Trillin (1935) American journalist

Idea

“I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“What people regard as vanity—leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten—I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.”

Paulo Coelho book The Pilgrimage

Source: The Pilgrimage

Children, People, Way

“You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”

Raymond Carver book Cathedral

Source: Cathedral

Understanding

“Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Suffering

“She put a wedge beside my heart
And then she brought the mallet down
She sang no song to guide her work
I lost my heart without a sound”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Heart

“Oh, for Christ's sake,' I hear. 'Can we please just try to have a good time?' This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it.”

David Sedaris When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Source: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Time, Christ

“There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.”

Jonathan Franzen book Freedom

Source: Freedom

Pain, Sadness

“Macon: “It’s true. And if that doesn’t work, use the Jedi Mind Trick. But only if you really have to.”
Halley: “The what?”
Macon: “The Jedi Mind Trick.” He looked at me. “Didn’t you ever see Star Wars?”

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

Source: Someone Like You

War, Star

“Work could cure almost anything”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

“Things had a way of working out for the best when you let them run their course.”

Jodi Picoult Plain Truth

Source: Plain Truth

Way

“The work of memory collapses time.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Memory, Time

“I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Has been attributed to Stephen Leacock's "Literary Lapses" (1910), but the quote does not appear in the Project Gutenberg edition http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6340/6340.txt of this work. Misattributed Variant: I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. Variant: I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Motivational

“Oh yeah. It would be terrible for you to have only one working fang. Your friends might want to call you Lefty”

Kerrelyn Sparks (1955) American writer

Source: How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire

“Go on with your work as usual, for work is a blessed solace.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

“I thought if I quit looking around for you, I would forget you. I thought if I avoided you, I could get you out of my head. But it didn’t work.”

Rachel Gibson (1961) American writer

Source: See Jane Score

Forgetting

“A relationship isn't something that has to be created in a day or perfected in a day. Part of the game is to keep working on it. It's something that'll always be just a little flawed.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Game, Parting, Perfection

“Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Evil, Change

“I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

Parent

“I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.”

Ann Brashares (1967) American children's writer

Love, World

“The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

Inspirational, Motivational, Positive, Good Morning

“I'd blurted out the question only to keep him from noticing that I was working my hands free, but the Warden behind me, some young brown-haired surfer dude, yelled a warning. "She's getting loose!"
Narc.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Thin Air

Question

“You try to keep life simple but it never works, and in the end all you have left is yourself.”

Sue Grafton (1940–2017) American writer

Source: A is for Alibi

Life

“Eva: it's going to be a lot of work., Gideon

Gideon: im not afraid of work
Im only afraid of LOSING YOU”

Sylvia Day book Bared to You

Source: Bared to You

“I gave him a smile. I was aiming for sweet, but he turned a shade paler and scooted a bit farther from me. Note to self: work more on sweet and less on psycho-killer.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Strikes

Smile

“We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

“Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Source: Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques

People, Intelligence, Thinking, Solitude

“We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.
(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“This thing about looking for someone less different… It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.”

Nick Hornby About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Social Deterioration
1980s–1990s, Is Reality Optional? (1993)

World, Education, History, Failure

“The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.”

Stephen King book Lisey's Story

Source: Lisey's Story

“The only thing I do know for sure is that if we both want to, we’ll find a way to make it work.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Longest Ride

Source: The Longest Ride

Way

“One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Age, Time

“But as I pursued that dream of upward mobility preparing for college, things just didn't fit together. As I read Scriptures about how the last will be first, I started wondering why I was working so hard to be first.”

Shane Claiborne The Irresistible Revolution

Source: The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

Dreams, Reading

“The material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you, including yourself.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: The Portable Henry Rollins

“Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But i dont agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time" *”

George Balanchine (1904–1983) Georgian choreographer, dancer and ballet master (1904-1983)

Beauty, Time

“We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

“The rule of the Morrell family was over, and Richard owned a used-car lot and Monica worked at a nail salon, until one day she got run over by a bus. Very sad.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Black Dawn

Sadness, Family, Cars

“No, I am never setting foot in this house again it scares me and makes me sad and I wish you could be a mom whose eyes worked but I don't think you can.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

Sadness, Moms, Thinking, Housing

“Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life.”

Augusten Burroughs book Dry

Source: Dry

Life

“My entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

Author's Introduction, p. 15
Report to Greco (1965)

Soul, Cry

“Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Life, Study, Passion, Chance

“This is insane," I said blankly. "I'm the instrument of an all-powerful primordial deity's wave of chaos and destruction."

"That's kind of extreme" said Dante jovially. "It's not like you work for Google or anything.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Succubus Dreams

“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future´s sakes.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"Two Tramps in Mud Time" (1936), st. 9
General sources

Love, Future

“what i really want - and what i never get - is to be appreciated. do you know what it’s like to work so hard to make sure everyone’s happy, and to have not a single person recognize it”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Personality, Happiness

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Widely attributed on the Internet to John Ruskin; see this Google search https://www.google.com/search?num=50&q=%2B%22When+love+and+skill+work+together%2C+expect+a+masterpiece.%22+%2B%22John+Ruskin%22+-%22Charles+Reade%22&oq=%2B%22When+love+and+skill+work+together%2C+expect+a+masterpiece.%22+%2B%22John+Ruskin%22+-%22Charles+Reade%22&gs_l=serp.12...143064.148395.0.150598.2.2.0.0.0.0.108.196.1j1.2.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..0.0.0.JURsIFvRl34 for thousands of pages containing the quote AND "John Ruskin" but NOT "Charles Reade". This is actually from Put Yourself in His Place by Charles Reade. Misattributed

Success, Love

“When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Music, Study

“An honest man's the noblest work of God”

Alexander Pope An Essay on Man

Source: An Essay on Man

God

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Thinking, Reading

“Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

“I don't wait for inspiration. I'm not, in fact, quite sure what inspiration is, but I'm sure that if it is going to turn up, my having started work is the precondition of its arrival.”

Quentin Blake (1932) English cartoonist, illustrator and children's writer

Source: Words and Pictures

Waiting

“In America, here is how we operate: We work for what we want, and we get ahead. We never take no for answer, and we deserve the rewards of our perseverance.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Perseverance

“We could go back to your house. I can stay with you always. We can know each others bodies in every way, night after night. I could love you. I could work, you would not be poor. I would help you.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead to the World

Source: Dead to the World

Love, Way, Help, Housing

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Acknowledgements, p. 549
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Books, Idea, Bee, Reading

“You will be fierce. You will fearless. And you will make work you know in your heart is not as good as you want it to be.”

Ira Glass (1959) American radio personality

Heart

“He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

Beauty, Loyalty

“Live a balanced life — learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986)

Life, Thinking, Learning, Singing

“Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

“Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

People

“Nothing indicts female allegiance to patriarchy more than the willingness to behave as though the problems created by cultural investment in sexist thinking about the nature of male and female roles can be solved by women's working harder.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Communion: The Female Search for Love

Women, Nature, Problem, Thinking

“Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work”

Kent Beck (1961) software engineer

“We had pathetically simple dreams:
to do meaningful work that we could be proud of, to be together, and to be happy.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: God-Shaped Hole

Dreams, Happiness

“One more instance I will give of his interest and his knowledge. We were passing under a fir tree when we heard a small song in the tree above us. We stopped and I said that was the song of a golden-crested wren. He listened very attentively while the bird repeated its little song, as its habit is. Then he said, "I think that is exactly the same song as that of a bird that we have in America"; and that was the only English song that he recognized as being the same as any bird song in America. Some time afterwards I met a bird expert in the Natural History Museum in London and told him this incident, and he confirmed what Colonel Roosevelt had said, that the song of this bird would be about the only song that the two countries had in common. I think that a very remarkable instance of minute and accurate knowledge on the part of Colonel Roosevelt. It was the business of the bird expert in London to know about birds. Colonel Roosevelt's knowledge was a mere incident acquired, not as part of the work of his life, but entirely outside it.”

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862–1933) British Liberal statesman

Recreation (1919)

Life, History, Business, Nature

“I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 60, note 92

Time

“He describes him in general terms, as the most incomprehensible and formidable among men; as engaged in schemes, reasonably suspected to be, in the highest degree, criminal, but such as no human intelligence is able to unravel: that his ends are pursued by means which leave it in doubt whether he be not in league with some infernal spirit: that his crimes have hitherto been perpetrated with the aid of some unknown but desperate accomplices: that he wages a perpetual war against the happiness of mankind, and sets his engines of destruction at work against every object that presents itself.”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Men, War, Intelligence, Happiness

“I think my reputation is something that I'll probably try to spend the rest of my life living it down and it probably won't work.”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

60 Minutes interview (2006)

Life, Thinking

“If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me … I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job … The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”

Gary Webb (1955–2004) American investigative journalist

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.

People, Truth, Appearance

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, People, Age, Art

“The money men make from their willingness to work the least desirable hours is not a sign of discrimination against women, but a sign of the willingness of mostly married men to lose sleep to support the family as their wife loses sleep to feed the child. A willingness to do the uncomfortable shifts is one reason married men earn more than twice what never-married men earn. Men's contribution, made at night, need not be lost in the dark.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 69.

Women, Men, Money, Family

“As for one-party rule, it was questioned neither by the Left Opposition nor by the Right [wing of the Communist party]. All were prisoners of their own doctrine and their own past: all had worked with a will to create the apparatus of violence that crushed them. Bukharin’ s hopeless attempt to form a league with Kamenev was no more than a pitiful epilogue to his career. In November 1929 the deviationists performed a public act of penance, but even this did not save them. Stalin’ s victory was complete; the collapse of the Bukharinite opposition meant the triumph of autocracy in the party and in the country. In December 1929 Stalin’ s fiftieth birthday was celebrated as a major historical event, and from this point we may date the "cult of personality". Trotsky’ s prophecy of 1903 had come true: party rule had become Central Committee rule, and this in turn had becorne the personal tyranny of a dictator.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown, pp. 42-3

Birthday, Question, Past, Victory

“Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Source: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), p. 139-140

People, Support, Time, Reading

“We were all keen since the beginning, starting with the directives of His Majesty King Abdullah II, who was aware of the importance of this work for decision makers, to ensure that the census would proceed according to its plan”

Abdullah Ensour (1939) prime minister of Jordan

Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour on Monday attended a conference to launch the official results of the 2015 national population and housing census, quoted on Petra.gov, "PM attends conference to launch official results of national census" http://www.petra.gov.jo/Public_News/Nws_NewsDetails.aspx?lang=2&site_id=1&NewsID=239314&CatID=13, February 22, 2016.

Decision

“To estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communicated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their country; nor would it be less grovelling and incongruous to estimate the benefit which the country has derived from the Revolution of 1688, by the pay of the soldiers, and all other payments concerned in effecting it.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book I, Chapter I, Of The Definitions of Wealth and of Productive Labour, Section II, p. 49
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Communication, Country

“If we observe the totality of Camille Pissarro's works, we find there, despite the fluctuations, not only an extreme artistic will which never lies, but what is more, an essentially intuitive pure-bred art... He looked at everybody, you say! Why not? Everyone looked at him, too, but denied him. He was one of my masters and I do not deny him.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Quote c. 1902, in Racontars d'un Rapin, Paul Gauguin; as quoted in 'Introduction' of Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro – (translated from the unpublished French letters by Lionel Abel); Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 15
After Paul Cezanne it was Gauguin who came to ask advice and painted landscape at the side of the much elder Pissarro. The traces of this apprenticeship as an impressionist were soon to disappear from Gauguin's works, but shortly before he died, he wrote these sentences about his former teacher
1890s - 1910s

Art

“The violence and intimidation we have seen should never have happened. It is the work of extremists. It is the enemy within.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

TV Interview for BBC2 Newsnight (27 July 1984) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105565 Second term as Prime Minister

“This situation [alienation] can therefore [according to Durkheim] be remedied by providing the individual with a moral awareness of the social importance of his particular role in the division of labour. He is then no longer an alienated automaton. but is a useful part of an organic whole: ‘from that time, as special and uniform as his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for it has direction, and he is aware of it.’ This is entirely consistent with Durkheim’s general account of the growth of the division of labour, and its relationship to human freedom. It is only through moral acceptance in his particular role in the division of labour that the individual is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy as a self-conscious being, and can escape both the tyranny of rigid moral conformity demanded in undifferentiated societies on the one hand and the tyranny of unrealisable desires on the other.
Not the moral integration of the individual within a differentiated division of labour but the effective dissolution of the division of labour as an organising principle of human social intercourse, is the premise of Marx’s conception. Marx nowhere specifies in detail how this future society would be organised socially, but, at any rate,. this perspective differs decisively from that of Durkheim. The vision of a highly differentiated division of labour integrated upon the basis of moral norms of individual obligation and corporate solidarity. is quite at variance with Marx’s anticipation of the future form of society.
According to Durkheim’s standpoint. the criteria underlying Marx’s hopes for the elimination of technological alienation represent a reversion to moral principles which are no longer appropriate to the modern form of society. This is exactly the problem which Durkheim poses at the opening of The Division of Labour: ‘Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being. one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism?’ The analysis contained in the work, in Durkheim’s view, demonstrates conclusively that organic solidarity is the ‘normal’ type in modern societies, and consequently that the era of the ‘universal man’ is finished. The latter ideal, which predominated up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe is incompatible with the diversity of the contemporary order. In preserving this ideal. by contrast. Marx argues the obverse: that the tendencies which are leading to the destruction of capitalism are themselves capable of effecting a recovery of the ‘universal’ properties of man. which are shared by every individual.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 230-231.

Hope, Intelligence, Problem, Decision

“Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world. Of those three components only one, the medium, is material.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

As quoted in Hans Hofmann (1963) by William Chapin Seitz, p. 15
1960s

World, Law, Nature

“It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. … In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and "He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. … There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday

Men, God, Religion, Feeling

“True we can not see God, but we can see the genius of God by works for His hands. We can see by the order of creation that a Creator must exist; reason, logic and common sense point to that conclusion. It is the epitome of foolishness to say our world with its seasons, weather patterns, trees, flowers, birds etc…was the result of some explosion in space of which our earth was a part. How can we say that the human body “just happened” with no intelligent creator behind it? The motive for saying there is no God is deeper than just ignorance.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

God, World, Intelligence, Flowers

“Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth; at Byzantium it was not a mere hypothesis that was sponsored by the majesty of the Byzantine style. To us, however, these forms make their appeal as forms alone — in other words, as they would be were they the work of a contemporary (and, since this actually is unthinkable, they affect us in a puzzling manner); or else as so many grandiose vestiges of a faith that has died out. We look at them from outside; they are still emotive, but they are no longer true. Thus we deprive them of what was their most vital element; for a religious civilization that regarded what it revered as a mere hypothesis is inconceivable.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

Part IV, Chapter V
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

Truth, Faith

“Woman's soul is present and lives more intensely in all parts of the body, and it is inwardly affected by that which happens to the body; whereas, with men, the body has more pronoucedly the character of an instrument which serves them in their work and which is accompanied by a certain detachment.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), Spirituality of the Christian Woman (1932)

Men, Soul, Parting

“Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.”

Florence Scovel Shinn (1871–1940) American writer

The Game of Life and How to Play It https://archive.org/details/gameoflifehowtop00shin (1925)

Failure

“We are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human’s abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism. We strive to imagine (and show to the viewer) the reality of the 21st century - the life of future humans developing, solving their difficulties and problems but being already on the new levels of cognition and morality. But the foundation of that future is being laid now. We strive to represent the future people as vivid and free, in the unity of their joys and cares, poetry and prose of their life. We are in no way satisfied with the primitive and unconvincing image of "people of the future", which can be observed in some works of literature and cinema. At the same time, we consider our work to be polemical with the many books and movies produced by the bourgeois world, which tend to see the future in an apocalyptic or technocratic way, affirming a sort of disbelief in the strength and capabilities of a human being.”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director

Letter to the central committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) https://varjag2007su.livejournal.com/2591915.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social (20 October 1970).

Life, War, People, Books

“My work has a strong negative element. I have my own inner demons to deal with. Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can't otherwise grasp. What I don't want to do, what I dread more than anything, is to leave a legacy of crap. I don't want my work to be tossed in the dustbin of history, and become more of the second rate, mediocre junk that future connoisseurs will have to move out of the way so they can get at the good stuff.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 394

Way, History, Strong, Future

“In their work, designers often become expert with the device they are designing. Users are often expert at the task they are trying to perform with the device. […] Professional designers are usually aware of the pitfalls. But most design is not done by professional designers, it is done by engineers, programmers, and managers.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 6, p. 156.

“If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”

Charlotte Brontë book Shirley

Source: Shirley (1849), Ch. 1: Levitical

Thinking, Passion

“I'm a lawyer. I make lawyers for a living. I believe in the law. I believe in the law of copyright. Indeed, I have devoted my life to working in law, not because there are big bucks at the end but because there are ideals at the end that I would love to live.
Yet much of this book has been a criticism of lawyers, or the role lawyers have played in this debate. The law speaks to ideals, but it is my view that our profession has become too attuned to the client. And in a world where the rich clients have one strong view, the unwillingness of the profession to question or counter that one strong view queers the law.
The evidence of this bending is compelling. I'm attacked as a "radical" by many within the profession, yet the positions that I am advocating are precisely the positions of some of the most moderate and significant figures in the history of this branch of the law.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Love, Life, Books, World

“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room. Most important, a newborn infant could expect to live not to age forty-five, but to age seventy-two. The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016, p. 1 ; Lead paragraph

Life, Death, Pain, War

“Against the average user, anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker, on the other hand, nothing works.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

The Fallacy of Trusted Client Software, Schneier, Bruce, 2001-08, Cryptogram newsletter, 2018-08-12 https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2000/08/the_fallacy_of_trust.html, Digital Rights Management