A Work Of Artifice Quotes

With living creatures / one must begin very early / to dwarf their growth : / the bound feet, / the crippled brain, / the hair curlers, / the hands you / love to touch. ~ Marge Piercy

I began after college, about 1972. I began to teach myself photography. I went to work for a local newspaper for four years as a kind of basic training. ~ James Nachtwey

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy. ~ Russell Baker

We are all born without knowledge, but curious. With curiosity we should be able to learn as much as possible. With curiosity, it has to take a lot of work to remain ignorant. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Everything is arranged," John Robertson told me.

Thank God."

I forgot to mention that we appear to have one small problem," he said.

Okay..."

Evidently it seems Winston Holder has already left this morning to the border and Gbarnga. He took a journalist in."

A journalist? Who?"

I don't know who. They thought it must be you."

But it wasn't me. I'm me," I said, though from the first hour in this country I'd begun to doubt it.

I have Lincoln Smythe's address. He'll put us right. Everything will be arranged promptly, and we'll work out your itinerary."

I thought everything was arranged," I said.

By the bare bulb hung above our straw beds I saw, far back in John Robertson's eyes, the eternal West African question: What is this guy going on about?

Naturally," he said, "but we just have to work out your itinerary."

Everything is arranged doesn't mean you should expect to get anywhere or accomplish anything. In fact, for sanity's sake, those two ideas have to be banished: the idea of getting somewhere and the idea of accomplishing something. Everything is arranged means that all is complete, the great plan of the universe is unfolding before our eyes. So eat, drink, sleep. Everything is arranged. ~ Denis Johnson

As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence. ~ Michael Palin

Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self-image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them. ~ Tyler Cowen

A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness. ~ Ernst Junger

I took a job in the U.S. because I wanted to work on products that would get into end users' hands. In Norway, most of the jobs are in server software, niche stuff. ~ Jon Johansen

Until such time as one has put to oneself a certain number of questions about an author, and has answered them, be it only to oneself alone and under one's breath, one cannot be sure of having grasped him completely, even though the questions may seem quite foreign to the nature of his writings: What were his religious ideas? How did the spectacle of nature affect him? How did he behave in the matter of women, of money? Was he rich, poor; what was his diet, his daily routine? What was his vice or his weakness? None of the answers to these questions is irrelevant. Even so, the answers tend to be surprising. However brilliant, however wise the work, it seems that the lives of artists can be relied upon to exhibit an extraordinary, incongruous range of turmoil, misery, and stupidity. ~ Alain De Botton

The pineal gland is a link between the consciousness of man and the invisible worlds of Nature. Whenever the arc of the pituitary body contacts this gland there are flashes of temporary clairvoyance, but the process of making these two work together consistently is one requiring not only years bur lives of consecration and special physiological and biological training. This third eye is the Cyclopean eye of the ancients, for it was an organ of conscious vision long before the physical eyes were formed, although vision was a sense of cognition rather than sight in those ancient days. ~ Manly P. Hall

I'll not always be here on guard. The stars twinkle in the Milky Way and the wind sighs for songs across the empty fields of a planet a Galaxy away.
You won't always be here.
But before you go, whisper this to your sons and their sons - The work was free. Keep it so. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead. This scarcity makes leadership valuable ... It's uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers. It's uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail. It's uncomfortable to challenge the status quo. It's uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle ... If you're not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it's almost certain you're not reaching your potential as a leader. ~ Seth Godin

Unemployment is considered an evil today, but it would not be if it were supported by a social dividend and spread out over the economy. What if everyone worked 20 percent less, instead of 20 percent of the people working not at all? This economic circumstance coincides with a shift in consciousness as more and more of us reject the conventional notion of work - the division of life into two exclusive zones, work and leisure. ~ Anonymous

It's nice when you put in a lot of hard work and you're recognized and a few people appreciate what you've done. ~ Travis Hafner

There's a rhythm to the words combined with the pictures [in a comic]. Whenever I'm working on a comic strip I re-read it, probably hundreds of times through to pay attention to how all of those things work. Sometimes even changing the angle of a character's eyebrow can really, seriously alter the effect and overall interpretation of a scene. And the insertion of a pause or a cough or a sniff, and all these things that we do in conversation, can bring it to life in a strange way. ~ Chris Ware

I want the peace in knowing that is wasn't for lack of hustling that I missed a target for my dream. I want to know that the one thing in my control was under control. ~ Jon Acuff

Seems Google management figured out it is cheaper, happier and more productive to take care of their employees and create a positive work environment than to burn them to a crisp, make them afraid of the future, and send them off into the highways and byways of California in search of a Taco Bell for lunch. ~ Joe McNally

see the building after work. It was a perfect night with stars and a full moon just above the trees, which he took to be a sign. 'I felt so happy,' he recalls. 'My dream was coming true.' Naeem and my father invested their entire savings of 60,000 rupees. They borrowed 30,000 rupees more to repaint the building, rented a shack across the road to live in and went from door to door trying to find students. Unfortunately ~ Malala Yousafzai

At the heart of vulnerability lies the willingness of people to abandon their pride and their fear, to sacrifice their egos for the collective good of the team. While this can be a little threatening and uncomfortable at first, ultimately it becomes liberating for people who are tired of spending time and energy overthinking their actions and managing interpersonal politics at work. ~ Patrick Lencioni

As Harvard developmental psychologist Howard Gardner reminds us, The young child is totally egocentric - meaning not that he thinks selfishly only about himself, but to the contrary, that he is incapable of thinking about himself. The egocentric child is unable to differentiate himself from the rest of the world; he has not separated himself out from others or from objects. Thus he feels that others share his pain or his pleasure, that his mumblings will inevitably be understood, that his perspective is shared by all persons, that even animals and plants partake of his consciousness. In playing hide-and-seek he will "hide" in broad view of other persons, because his egocentrism prevents him from recognizing that others are aware of his location. The whole course of human development can be viewed as a continuing decline in egocentrism.2 ~ Ken Wilber

As a writer, the worst thing you can do is work in an environment of fear of rejection. ~ Carol Leifer

When you work with Sir Anthony there are days when he will do a lot of takes if he's really enjoying a scene. ~ Claire Forlani

Usually after I'm done with working, I just come home and play a little game and go to bed. After work, I have a lot time to do a lot of stuff. I think I've got a good balance of work and play. ~ Benjamin Stockham

The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums. Granting the frailty, and no doubt the impermanence, of modern technology as a human contrivance, the man who can keep a fire in a stove or on a hearth is not only more durable, but wiser, closer to the meaning of fire, than the man who can only work a thermostat. ~ Wendell Berry

I had an experience of knowing the Polish people when I was a child, and where my father worked many Poles came to work after the war. They were good people, and this has stayed in my heart. ~ Pope Francis

As I am a work in progress, you shall see me more or less? Don't shake me out if I digress. As of me less, from me more of my work, I guess. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

How are you so strong?' I asked her.

She came over and held me.

'Anything is doable as long as it's time-limited,' she said. 'This pain will never go away, but it will get easier.'

My mother was so sad, but so brave at the same time. Once when she was at work during this time, she had a contentious exchange with a table full of doctors at the hospital. Uncharacteristically, she burst into tears. While crying, she choked out: 'These tears are not about you. They are about my husband. But don't let the tears dilute the content of my message. ~ Megyn Kelly

To accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers' rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder. ~ Noam Chomsky

In the yogic tradition, this principle of using intense effort to burn through life's distractions is called Tapas. It's another Sanskrit word, roughly defined as "heat" or "essential energy." The concept is that through a disciplined approach to work and self-sacrifice, Tapas will burn away the negativity that separates us from God. By working our hardest and happily enduring the hardships of life we are able to create a sense of peace and clarity in ourselves. ~ Russell Simmons

Work hard and meticulously. When in trouble, look closely at a text that is a good example of what you're trying to do. And be patient. ~ Lydia Davis

You teach the reader that he's way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you're dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you're the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need ... is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we're smart. And that's the stuff that TV and movies - although they're great at certain things - cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art ... Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don't want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it. ~ David Foster Wallace

You have done all this work to create a hiring process that brings in all these awesome smart creatives, and how do they pay you back? By leaving!! That's right. News flash: When you hire great people, some of them may come to realize that there is a world beyond yours. This isn't a bad thing, in fact it's an inevitable by-product of a healthy, innovative team. Still, fight like hell to keep them. ~ Eric Schmidt

But to paraphrase Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, ignorance and mediocrity are forever busy, and the forces of mediocrity aren't content with being mediocre; they'll do everything in their power to prevent even the humblest of teachers and children from accomplishing anything extraordinary. For good work shines a light on the failures of the mediocre, and that is a light which terrifies those who conspire to keep our nation's children, like themselves, ordinary. ~ Rafe Esquith

I want you to live in confidence that when God looks at you, He sees beauty. He sees value. He sees hope. And that even when you're hiding, or when you're so beaten down you can't see anything clearly, He's still hard at work, crafting a beautiful future of relationship with Him and with others. ~ Tammy Maltby

There are occasions that I love to be fashionable and enjoy, you know? But the work day of a mother doesn't include a hair making team or any consideration of your shoe. ~ Sarah Jessica Parker

Classically, cosmetics companies will take highly theoretical, textbookish information about the way that cells work - the components at a molecular level or the behavior of cells in a glass dish - and then pretend it's the same as the ultimate issue of whether something makes you look nice. "This molecular component," they say, with a flourish, "is crucial for collagen formation." And that will be perfectly true (along with many other amino acids which are used by your body to assemble protein in joints, skin, and everywhere else), but there is no reason to believe that anyone is deficient in it or that smearing it on your face will make any difference to your appearance. In general, you don't absorb things very well through your skin, because its purpose is to be relatively impermeable. When you sit in a bath of baked beans for charity, you do not get fat, nor do you start farting. ~ Ben Goldacre

The main challenge that television presents is that I have a tendency to say things with a great deal of precision and accuracy. Often a description of that sort, which will work in a book because people can read it slowly - they can turn the pages back and so on - doesn't really work on TV because it interrupts the flow of the moving image. ~ Brian Greene

I know a lot of people feel like they get eaten alive by New York, but I feel it more as a father figure or something - this huge presence watching over me. I definitely feel better and work freer here. ~ Dev Hynes

Embrace the common: a Sunday afternoon watching sports, Starbucks with a friend, cooking dinner for a neighbor, taking the dog for a walk, heading to a job that is making you more humble and needy because it is so unfulfilling, or working through conflict with a friend you have offended. This and more is all part of it. So do your everyday and your ordinary. Godliness is found and formed in those places. No man or woman greatly used by God has escaped them. Great men and women of God have transformed the mundane, turning neighborhoods into mission fields, parenting into launching the next generation of God's voices, legal work into loving those most hurting, waiting tables into serving and loving in such a way that people see our God. ~ Jennie Allen

My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn't ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn't know if I would be able to keep my house. ~ Tom Hanks