“No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained in sudden flight but, they while their companions slept, they were toiling upwards in the night.”
“Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one s own inwardness.”
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today s employer is seeking. ”
“In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.”
“When you play, play hard; when you work, don t play at all.”
“I don t really like coffee, she said, but I don t really like it when my head hits my desk when I fall asleep either. ”
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that s almost never the case.”
“Jobs are a part of life. Maybe you ve heard of the concept. It s called work? See, what happens is that you suffer through doing annoying and humiliating things until you get paid not enough money. Like those Japanese game shows, only without all the glory.”
“I am focused on the work. I am constantly creating. I am a busy girl. I live and breathe my work. I love what I do. I believe in the message. There s no stopping. I didn t create the fame, the fame created me.”
“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”
“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.”