Quotes about Work

The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well--to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how--and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone.

It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude.

Wendell Berry's formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.

Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One's

An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

Do we, for instance, carry on our work in our nest or do we only reside and get our mail there? Is our nest a place of consumption only or is it also a place of production?

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever.

The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

I have, to fill my mind and occupy my hands, the daily rounds of my economy. I have food to harvest and preserve in the summer and fall, firewood to gather and saw up and split in the fall and winter, the garden to prepare and plant in the spring. I have clothes and bedclothes to wash, and myself to keep clean and presentable. I have the endless little jobs of housekeeping and repair... I have books to read, and much to sit and watch.

As Walter Shewring rightly said, both "the plowman and the potter have a cosmic function." And bad art in any trade dishonors and damages Creation.

People are making careful, comely, dignified work of the essential tasks defined by modern values as "drudgery." And because they have thought of the well-being of all the people, all are busy. There is a use for everyone. The Amish do not have the abandoned children, cast-off old people, criminals, indigents, and vagrants whom we have "freed from drudgery." And