Theme

Work

Craft, duty, and the morning you do not want. The best lines here refuse both hustle and idleness. They ask what the work is for.

1. Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit.AristotleNicomachean Ethics
2. In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present — I am rising to the work of a human being.Marcus AureliusMeditations
3. The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.Johann Sebastian BachA note in his musical instruction
4. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.Albert CamusThe Myth of Sisyphus
5. The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.Geoffrey ChaucerThe Parliament of Fowls
6. Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.Anton ChekhovLetter to Alexei Suvorin
7. If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.Shirley ChisholmA line she used with audiences throughout her career
8. Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?ConfuciusAnalects
9. We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves.Marie CuriePierre Curie
10. What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?George EliotMiddlemarch
11. Well done is better than well said.Benjamin FranklinPoor Richard’s Almanack
12. You have a right to the work alone, never to its fruits. Let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.The Bhagavad GitaBhagavad Gita
13. Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.John F. KennedyInaugural Address
14. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.John F. KennedyAddress at Rice University
15. The journey of a thousand li commences with a single step.LaoziTao Te Ching
16. A house is a machine for living in.Le CorbusierToward an Architecture
17. He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.Leonardo da VinciNotebooks
18. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.Karl MarxTheses on Feuerbach
19. I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.Mary ShelleyFrankenstein
20. If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.Toni MorrisonA remark to students, repeated in talks from the early 1980s
21. I am a musician.Wolfgang Amadeus MozartLetter to his father
22. Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity — these three — and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?Florence NightingaleCassandra
23. The drop hollows the stone not by force, but by falling often.OvidEpistulae ex Ponto
24. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.John SteinbeckThe Grapes of Wrath
25. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.Nikola TeslaA remark on his contemporaries, often dated to his later interviews
26. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.Henry David ThoreauWalden
27. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man.Sojourner TruthSpeech at the Women’s Rights Convention, Akron
28. I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.Harriet TubmanRemarks recalled from her lectures
29. Cast down your bucket where you are.Booker T. WashingtonAtlanta Exposition Address
30. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.Virginia WoolfA Room of One’s Own

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