Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness.

Every man's task is his life-preserver.

He that can work is a born king of something.

He that will not work according to his faculty, let him peris!) according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that.

What is work? and what is not work? are questions that perplex the wisest of men.

Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

A man’s work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.

Most men in a brazen prison live, / Where, in the sun’s hot eye, / With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly / Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, / Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall.

Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.

Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective—women’s bank, women’s music, women’s studies, women’s caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics.

Words are the small change of thought.

How describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.

It [modern writing at its worst] consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

It’s when the thing itself is missing that you have to supply the word.

Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them.

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

You can stroke people with words.

It’s strange that words are so inadequate. / Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, / So the lover must struggle for words.

A word carries far—very far—deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater.

It’s a man’s world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

Womankind / Is ever a fickle and a changeful thing.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter.

She hasn’t been attending a weekly women’s discussion group down here for nothing. She feels indignant enough, independent enough, to get up and march into the kitchen and open the cabinet doors and pull down the Campari bottle and an orange-juice glass.

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be downplayed or forgotten.

The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.

There’s more to Bunnyhood than stuffing bosoms.

A woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil dress her not.

Women are as roses, whose fair flower, / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.

It is a high distinction for a homely woman to be loved for her character rather than for beauty.

Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer once we know them.

Women themselves always still have in the background of all personal vanity an impersonal contempt for “woman.”

Women are like dreams—they are never the way you would like to have them.

Let man fear woman when she loves: then she makes any sacrifice, and everything else seems without value to her.

Where neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman’s game is mediocre.

It costs an unreasonable woman no more to pass over one reason than another; they cherish themselves most where they are most wrong.

Women would rather be right than reasonable.