Work and Profession

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

A man you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

I am naturally very sorry to see you go, but understand … your wish to be able to spend more time with your family.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

Every one lives by selling something.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

When we, the Workers, all demand: ‘What are WE fighting for?’ …

‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

Does it matter?—losing your sight? …

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.

This is Red Hook, not Sicily … This is the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world.

He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.