Quotes about working
page 10

Marquis de Sade photo

“I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am compelled to set my apology alongside my vindication, I shall therefore say that it might well be possible that those who condemn me as unjustly as I have been might themselves be unable to offset the infamies by good works as clearly established as those I can contrast to my errors. I am a libertine, but three families residing in your area have for five years lived off my charity, and I have saved them from the farthest depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I have saved a deserter from death, a deserter abandoned by his entire regiment and by his colonel. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your whole family looking on, I saved a child—at the risk of my life—who was on the verge of being crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway horse-drawn cart, by snatching the child from beneath it. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised my wife’s health. Nor have I been guilty of the other kinds of libertinage so often fatal to children’s fortunes: have I ruined them by gambling or by other expenses that might have deprived them of, or even by one day foreshortened, their inheritance? Have I managed my own fortune badly, as long as I have had a say in the matter? In a word, did I in my youth herald a heart capable of the atrocities of which I today stand accused?… How therefore do you presume that, from so innocent a childhood and youth, I have suddenly arrived at the ultimate of premeditated horror? No, you do not believe it. And yet you who today tyrannize me so cruelly, you do not believe it either: your vengeance has beguiled your mind, you have proceeded blindly to tyrannize, but your heart knows mine, it judges it more fairly, and it knows full well it is innocent.”

Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French novelist and philosopher

This passage comes from a letter addressed to his wife. It was written during his imprisonment at the Bastille.
"L’Aigle, Mademoiselle…"

“I have to paint fast on television because of the limited time, but I don't want people to see what I'm showing them as work, something to worry and fret over. This is supposed to be fun.”

Bob Ross (1942–1995) American painter, art instructor, and television host

Judi Hunt (November 23, 1991) "Disciples of The Bob Ross Technique Find Joy in Learning They Can Paint", The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p. C1.

Eleanor Roosevelt photo
Friedrich Schiller photo

“Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise.”

Lebe mit deinem Jahrhundert, aber sei nicht sein Geschöpf; leiste deinen Zeitgenossen, aber was sie bedürfen, nicht was sie loben.
Letter 9
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Karl Marx photo

“Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth, it buys as long as it has the means to buy.”

Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 449.
Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893)

Jung Myung Seok photo
Selena photo

“When you get hard work you get success, and we put a lot of years into it.”

Selena (1971–1995) Mexican-American singer, songwriter, actress, and fashion designer

Selena reflecting on how hard she and her colleagues worked to get success on their careers.
"Selena Live" Interview (1993)

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy photo
Jean De La Fontaine photo

“By the work one knows the workman.”

Jean De La Fontaine (1621–1695) French poet, fabulist and writer.

A l'oeuvre on connaît l'artisan.
Book I (1668), fable 21 (The Hornets And The Bees)
Fables (1668–1679)
Variant: The artist by his work is known.

Barack Obama photo
Pearl Bailey photo

“What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.”

Pearl Bailey (1918–1990) American singer

Weekly World News, 25 Apr 2005 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3PMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA51&dq=%22What+the+world+really+needs+is+more+love+and+less+paper+work.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-2H5TsbNEcWj8QO14oC5AQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22What%20the%20world%20really%20needs%20is%20more%20love%20and%20less%20paper%20work.%22&f=false

Claude Monet photo

“There are the most amusing things everywhere [in The Netherlands]. Houses of every colour, hundreds of windmills and enchanting boats, extremely friendly Dutchmen who almost all speak French…. I have not had time to visit the museums, I wish to work first of all and I'll treat myself to that later.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote in a letter to Camille Pissarro, 17 June 1871; first part cited in: Van Gogh Museum Journal 2001 http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_van012200101_01/_van012200101_01_0012.php Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 2001. p. 140; second part cited in: Ann Dumas, ‎Denver Art Museum, ‎High Museum of Art (2007), Inspiring Impressionism: : the Impressionists and the art of the past. p. 181
1870 - 1890

George William Curtis photo
Jules Verne photo

“Now when an American has an idea, he directly seeks a second American to share it. If there be three, they elect a president and two secretaries. Given four, they name a keeper of records, and the office is ready for work; five, they convene a general meeting, and the club is fully constituted.”

Or, quand un Américain a une idée, il cherche un second Américain qui la partage. Sont-ils trois, ils élisent un président et deux secrétaires. Quatre, ils nomment un archiviste, et le bureau fonctionne. Cinq, ils se convoquent en assemblée générale, et le club est constitué.
Source: From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Ch. I: The Gun Club

Jordan Peterson photo
Theodore Roosevelt photo

“There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live – I have no use for the sour-faced man – and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Talk to schoolchildren in Oyster Bay, Christmastime (1898), as quoted in The Bully Pulpit : A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations (2002) by H. Paul Jeffers, p. 22
1890s

Barack Obama photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo

“I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government—but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops. Surely you can see the profound and abysmal difference between this emotional attitude and the attitude of the democratic reformer who becomes wildly excited over the "wrongs of the masses". This reformer has uppermost in his mind the welfare of those masses themselves—he feels with them, takes up a mental-emotional point of view as one of them, regards their advancement as his prime objective independently of anything else, and would willingly sacrifice the finest fruits of the civilisation for the sake of stuffing their bellies and giving them two cinema shows instead of one per day. I, on the other hand, don't give a hang about the masses except so far as I think deliberate cruelty is coarse and unaesthetic—be it towards horses, oxen, undeveloped men, dogs, negroes, or poultry. All that I care about is the civilisation—the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men. Any indignation I may feel in the whole matter is not for the woes of the downtrodden, but for the threat of social unrest to the traditional institutions of the civilisation. The reformer cares only for the masses, but may make concessions to the civilisation. I care only for the civilisation, but may make concessions to the masses. Do you not see the antipodal difference between the two positions? Both the reformer and I may unite in opposing an unworkably arrogant piece of legislation, but the motivating reasons will be absolutely antithetical. He wants to give the crowd as much as can be given them without wrecking all semblance of civilisation, whereas I want to give them only as much as can be given them without even slightly impairing the level of national culture. … He works for as democratic a government as possible; I for as aristocratic a one as possible.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

But both recognise the limitations of possibility.
Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 289-290
Non-Fiction, Letters

Arthur Miller photo

“If I see an ending, I can work backward.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)

Leon Trotsky photo
Aurelius Augustinus photo

“The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

Tractates on the Gospel of John; tractate XII on John 3:6-21, § 13 https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701012.htm

Richard Long photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Osamu Tezuka photo
Mark Twain photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo

“The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 91e

Terence V. Powderly photo
Napoleon I of France photo

“The future destiny of the child is always the work of his mother. Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

As quoted in Mama Was My Teacher: Growing Up In A Small Southern Town (2004) by Dozier Cade, p. 77
Attributed

Mark Twain photo
Charles Baudelaire photo

“It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Il faut travailler, sinon par goût, au moins par désespoir, puisque, tout bien vérifié, travailler est moins ennuyeux que s'amuser.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

Shakira photo
André Weil photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“It's time that we move from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Sound bite reported in <i>Time</i>, February 20, 2008. http://www.time.com/time/quotes/0,26174,1715169,00.html
Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

Dmitri Shostakovich photo
Andy Rooney photo
Bob Marley photo

“We JAH people can make it work.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Work
Uprising (1979)

Aleksandr Pushkin photo
Bertil Ohlin photo
Aleksandr Vasilevsky photo
Bryan Ferry photo

“All those rappers, they're the only glamorous people working in music now. The rock bands are rather drab, even the good ones. You definitely don't want to look at them. But some of those R&B people are very good.”

Bryan Ferry (1945) English musician

Source: Roxy Music legend Bryan Ferry unwinds in Paris, Talia Soghomonian, December 2002 http://www.musicomh.com/music/features/bryan-ferry.htm,

Mark Twain photo
Barack Obama photo
Theodore Roosevelt photo
Sarah Vaughan photo
Hermann Grassmann photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Alfred Cortot photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Heath Ledger photo
Shania Twain photo
Shreya Ghoshal photo

“I want to keep working 24*7. When I am not singing, I go into deep introspection mode and start asking myself, why I am not getting much songs. I feel even working 24*7 every day is less for me.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

Talked about changes in career after marriage http://www.hindustantimes.com/bollywood/i-feel-restless-when-i-m-not-singing-want-to-work-24-7-shreya-ghoshal/story-hAKs3O9xVa8bQXvZvKpXIP.html

Kanye West photo
Tupac Shakur photo
Barack Obama photo

“If Selma taught us anything, it’s that our work is never done. The American experiment in self-government gives work and purpose to each generation.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Bloody Sunday Speech (March 2015)

Hannes Alfvén photo

“I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.”

Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995) Swedish electrical engineer and plasma physicist

Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 197.

Henri Barbusse photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Samuel C. C. Ting photo
Norbert Wiener photo

“Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower… Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy… There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.
It is these boundary regions which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor. If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, then physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologists ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in terms that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand… A proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbors; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another's intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance of a colleague's new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look. We had dreamed for years of an institution of independent scientists, working together in one of these backwoods of science, not as subordinates of some great executive officer, but joined by the desire, indeed by the spiritual necessity, to understand the region as a whole, and to lend one another the strength of that understanding.”

Source: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), p. 2-4; As cited in: George Klir (2001) Facets of Systems Science, p. 47-48

Laozi photo
Stan Lee photo
Joseph Stalin photo
Barack Obama photo
Voltaire photo

“Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.”

Que les supplices des criminels soient utiles. Un homme pendu n’est bon à rien, et un homme condamné aux ouvrages publics sert encore la patrie, et est une leçon vivante.
"Civil and Ecclesiastical Laws," Dictionnaire philosophique (1785-1789)
The Dictionnaire philosophique was a posthumously published collection of articles combining the Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (published under various editions and titles from 1764 to 1777), the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (published from 1770 to 1774), articles written for the Encyclopédie and the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, the manuscript known as l'Opinion sur l'alphabet and a number of previously published miscellaneous articles.
Citas

Barack Obama photo
Barack Obama photo
Taylor Caldwell photo

“Antonius [i. e., C. Antonius Hybrida] heartily agreed with him [i. e., M. Tullius Cicero] that the budget should be balanced, that the Treasury should be refilled, that public debt should be reduced, that the arrogance of the generals should be tempered and controlled, that assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt, that the mobs should be forced to work and not depend on government for subsistence, and that prudence and frugality should be put into practice as soon as possible.”

A Pillar of Iron (1965), p. 483 of the 1965 edition published by Doubleday (Garden City, NY), and p. 371 (in chapter 51) of the 1966 British edition from Collins (London). The passage, as written or in shortened or modified form, has sometimes been misattributed to M. Tullius Cicero himself. Its origin and history of misquotation have been discussed at Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/05/15/cicero-budget/ and Snopes http://www.snopes.com/quotes/cicero.asp.
1960s

Isa Genzken photo
Dadabhai Naoroji photo

“He was of opinion that we should be able to convince the general English public, the working man particularly, that the reforms that I advanced would be far more beneficial to the English nation, particularly to the working man…If India is prosperous and rich, she would buy far more English produce and give work proportionately to the working man.”

Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917) Indian politician

His noting in his dairy after his contesting election in 1886 page=10.
Narrow-majority’ and ‘Bow-and-agree’: Public Attitudes Towards the Elections of the First Asian MPs in Britain, Dadabhai Naoroji and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree, 1885-1906

Barack Obama photo

“[T]he most important position in a democracy is not the office of the President. The most important office is the office of citizen, because if you have citizens who are informed and know about other countries, and recognize that if we provide foreign aid to some distant country in Africa, that ultimately may make us healthier. And if you have a citizenry that recognizes that even if I have to pay slightly more in taxes — which nobody likes paying taxes -- but if I do, maybe I can provide that young child who lives in a poorer neighborhood an opportunity for a better life. And then because she has a job and a better life, she can pay taxes, and then everybody has more, and the society is better off. If you don't have citizens like that, then you're going to get leaders who think very narrowly and you'll be disappointed. So the job — one thing I always tell young people, don't just think that you elect somebody and then you expect them to solve all your problems and then you just sit back and complain when it doesn't happen. You have to work as a citizen also to provide the leaders the space and the direction to do the right thing. It's just as important for you to challenge ignorance or discrimination or people who are always thinking in terms of war”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

it's just as important for you to do that as the President because I don't care how good the person, the leader you elect is, if the people want something different. In a democracy, at least, that's what's going to happen.
2016, Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative Town Hall (March 2016)

Aurelius Augustinus photo

“Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

Sometimes attributed to Augustine, but is from Phyllis McGinley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_McGinley, The Province of the Heart, "The Honor of Being a Woman" (1959).
Misattributed

Nikola Tesla photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“In the beginning of the year 1854 a new policy was inaugurated with the avowed object and confident promise that it would entirely and forever put an end to the Slavery agitation. It was again and again declared that under this policy, when once successfully established, the country would be forever rid of this whole question. Yet under the operation of that policy this agitation has not only not ceased, but it has been constantly augmented. And this too, although, from the day of its introduction, its friends, who promised that it would wholly end all agitation, constantly insisted, down to the time that the Lecompton bill was introduced, that it was working admirably, and that its inevitable tendency was to remove the question forever from the politics of the country. Can you call to mind any Democratic speech, made after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, down to the time of the Lecompton bill, in which it was not predicted that the Slavery agitation was just at an end; that "the abolition excitement was played out," "the Kansas question was dead," "they have made the most they can out of this question and it is now forever settled."”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

But since the Lecompton bill no Democrat, within my experience, has ever pretended that he could see the end. That cry has been dropped. They themselves do not pretend, now, that the agitation of this subject has come to an end yet.
1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)

Cate Blanchett photo
Henry Royce photo

“I have only one regret … that I have not worked harder.”

Henry Royce (1863–1933) English engineer, car designer, co-founder of Rolls-Royce

Deathbed assertion, as quoted in Outlook Business, Vol. 3, No. 4 (23 February 2008)

Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Richard Wagner photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Karl Marx photo
Giuseppe Verdi photo

“I deny that either singers or conductors can "create" or work creatively – this, as I have always said, is a conception that leads to the abyss.”

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) Italian composer

Io non posso ammettere, né nei cantanti, né nei direttori la facoltà di creare, che come dissi prima, è un principio che conduce all'abisso.
Letter to Giulio Ricordi, April 11, 1871, cited from Franco Abbiati Giuseppe Verdi (Milano: Ricordi, 1959) vol. 3, p. 448; translation from Franz Werfel and Paul Stefan (eds.), Edward Downes (trans.) Verdi: The Man in His Letters (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1942) pp. 301-2.

Tennessee Williams photo
Barack Obama photo

“Even though I'm president of the United States, my power is not limitless. So I can't dive down there and plug the hole. I can't suck it up with a straw. All I can do is make sure that I put honest, hard-working smart people in place … to implement this thing.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Radio interview, Grand Isle, LA, June 11, 2010. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/06/obama-on-spill-i-cant-suck-it.html?hpid=news-col-blog
2010, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (April 2010)

Abraham Lincoln photo
Oskar Schindler photo

“I knew the people who worked for me. When you know people, you have to behave towards them like human beings.”

Oskar Schindler (1908–1974) German industrialist and Holocaust rescuer

Response in 1965, to Moshe Bejski, one of the Schindlerjuden, who later a became a justice on the Supreme Court of Israel and president of the Commission to honor the Righteous Among the Nations, as quoted in "Schindler : Why did he do it?" (2010) by Louis Bülow http://www.auschwitz.dk/why/why.htm.

Karl Marx photo

“For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.”

Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, pp. 628–629.
Grundrisse (1857/58)
Context: The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital…
The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i. e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour...
The mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.

Nikola Tesla photo
Robert Pinsky photo

“Each work of art generate its own rules”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

Singing School

Claude Monet photo
Barack Obama photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Robert M. Pirsig photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Steve Jobs photo

“We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Interview in Macworld magazine (February 2004)
2000s

Theodore Roosevelt photo
Charles Spurgeon photo

“God works, and therefore we work; God is with- us, and therefore we are with God, and stand on His side.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 122

William Wilberforce photo
Theodore Roosevelt photo
José Saramago photo
Frederick Winslow Taylor photo