Routine Work Quotes

Goering got into endless arguments with other officers [and] he did not like routine work. ~ Richard Overy

You see, the Foreign Service of the United States has grown so unbelievably in the last twenty years, and the requirements for admission are so high, and yet an awful lot of the work, I'd say fully 50-percent of the work in the Foreign Service abroad, is really routine work. All this is something that no one has licked ... You get a certain amount of discontent. It's bad for morale. ~ Charles E. Bohlen

A good detective not only has to be intelligent, persevering and prepared to do enless boring routine work, he also needs one other quality: Intuition. I see it rather as the ability to make connections which are there but are not immediately apparent. Subterranean connections. ~ Dorothy Simpson

We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life. ~ Walter Pater

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed. ~ Lawrence Clark Powell

Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine. ~ Honore De Balzac

I'd like to give these detective story writers a course of routine work. They'd soon learn how most things are untraceable and nobody ever notices anything anywhere! ~ Agatha Christie

Zeal
what is it? How shall I describe it? Possess it, and you will know what it is. Be consumed with love for Christ, and let the flame burn continuously, not flaming up at public meetings and dying out in the routine work of every day. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I feel that opiates - I include opium and all its derivatives, such as morphine, heroin, pantopon, etc. - are quite useless for any sort of creative work, useful though they may be for routine work. Much of the hard physical work in the Far East is done by opium addicts. ~ William S. Burroughs

Contrary to popular belief, productivity isn't about how much you can do. It's about whether or not you're doing the right things - the things that matter to your work and to you. And that means starting small with what you know matters to you. ~ Melissa Steginus

Work hard to find something that fascinates you. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve. ~ William Wordsworth

326. Excessive reading does not make us smarter. Some people simply
"devour" books. They do it without the necessary intervals of thought, which are necessary in order to "digest," to process what has been read, to absorb and comprehend it. When people of that kind speak, pieces of Hegel, Heidegger and Marx come out raw, unprocessed. Reading requires personal contribution as much
as a bee requires "inner" work, as well as time, to transform pollen into honey. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

It is our job to work for the government of the day and so that means working for Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and we need to do those preparations just to be sure that we're ready for whoever you, the British public, elect and that's core to our civil service values over the last 150 years. ~ Gus O'Donnell

If you agree to work with uninspiring fossils, its only a matter of time that you will become one. ~ Faisal Khosa

The demons are innumerable, arrive at the most inappropriate times and create panic and terror ... but I have learned that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage ... Lilies often grow out of carcasses' arseholes. ~ Ingmar Bergman

With some artists, I've noticed that after their songs have been licensed, on their next album you can totally hear they're trying to write a song for 'Grey's Anatomy' and it doesn't work. It's just one of those things that has to feel genuine to last a long time. ~ Priscilla Ahn

My father didn't think being an artist was a respectable or worthy goal for a man. ~ Richard Diebenkorn

We're depriving our kids of the chance to do the work of life for themselves. ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

I don't really seek out vegetarian spots ... but mainly, I know how to work a menu no matter where I am. ~ Christie Brinkley

I didn't go to university, and so, every time that I work, I'm looking for a teacher in a way. I'm looking for people that I can learn from and to have the chance to work with people that I admire. ~ Diego Luna

I have been asked so many times why I live a green life, why water conservation, why getting wells in places, why work with water organizations, why conserve water at home with double-flush toilets, why I tell my daughters, "Turn off the tap" so much. Sometimes I want to say, "I wish I knew the answer." My answer really is: I don't understand why everyone doesn't feel this way. ~ Alysia Reiner

As I went about with my father, when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid someone had to work hard to earn the money to pay them. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Today it is imperative that any distinction or division should be overcome, because the choice between saving the world and changing it is a false one. They are intimately related, the work of redemption and the work of restoration. ~ Michael White

I was working from home at the time and sometimes indulged in a little wander around my yard, a hard reset before I got back to work. Today, however, I had ignored the nice weather and instead put my head on my desk, forehead pressed to the Formica and arms covering my skull.

I had joked with one of my yoga-loving co-workers that I was developing a series of poses that we could do at our desks. A head-in-hands slump over galleys called "Drudge's Hunch". The arms overhead seated stretch called "Fluorescent Salutation". The hand out position used to catch the fire door so it didn't slam and bother everyone. That was "Worrier's Pose".

My current pose was called "Nuclear Fallout". ~ Kory Stamper

California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries-and squandered that gift within a generation. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

If the boss is a jerk, get over it. First of all, don't you think there's a good chance that your boss's boss knows what's going on? If so, just keep your head down and do the work. Usually, if you put in maximum effort and produce excellent results, someone in the company is going to take notice. Either you will get promoted or your jerky boss will get the heave-ho. It happens all the time. ~ Suze Orman

The only incontrovertible fact of my work is the importance of life. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

My favorite thing to hear from people is, 'I left the theater and couldn't stop thinking about it.' You want your work to have an impact after they leave the theater. It's the equivalent of leaving a musical humming a show tune. ~ Marin Ireland

Sound is so important to creative writing. Think of the sounds you hear that you include and the similes you use to describe what things sound like. 'As she walked up the alley, her polyester workout pants sounded like windshield wipers swishing back and forth.' Cadence, onomatopoeia, the poetry of language are all so important. Learn all that you can about how to bring sound into your work. ~ Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work. ~ Andy Stern

With Instapaper, I can take a few months off. I can't stop publishing 'The Magazine' for two months and work on something else. ~ Marco Arment

Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines. ~ Karl Marx

I want to make beautiful paintings. But I don't make beautiful paintings by putting beautiful paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn't work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising. ~ Albert Oehlen

I'd feed you the cake just to watch your lips wrap around the fork. Then I'd watch your beautiful throat muscles work swallowing the sticky sweetness, fantasizin' about smearin' chocolate frosting down your neck so I could lick it off. Slowly. And when I finished feedin' you, I'd press my mouth to yours for a thorough taste of you and the cake. ~ Lorelei James

I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

I came to believe that God has reserved the office of elder for men, and I came to this conclusion not because of what my church taught or because of cultural trends but because of intense personal study of Scripture and the work of biblical scholars and linguists much wiser and more skilled than I. ~ Anonymous

We had a few issues to work out in the beginning. He made me quit smoking. I made him eat a candy bar. ~ C.L.Stone

If I could live again my life,
In the next - I'll try,
- to make more mistakes,
I won't try to be so perfect,
I'll be more relaxed ...
I'll take fewer things seriously..
I'll take more risks,
I'll take more trips,
I'll watch more sunsets,
I'll climb more mountains,
I'll swim more rivers,
I'll go to more places I've never been
I'll eat more ice ... I'll have more real problems and less imaginary ones
If I could live again - I will travel light
If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn,
I'll watch more sunrises ... If I have the life to live ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Everyone does', 'They say', 'tradition', 'studies show', these are not reasons to do or not to do anything, but rather excuses people use to avoid the work of thinking about the question. ~ Jennie Moench

The advantage of being lovers is that we have to work hard at our relationship, because everything conspires to drive us apart. Our decision to be together has to be renewed again and again; that keeps us on our toes. ~ Isabel Allende

Don't let anyone tell you your ideas are stupid or the thing you feel most passionate about 'won't work' - it's happened to me time and time again, and we find that if you push at what you think is interesting hard enough, you're probably right. ~ Dennis Crowley

The ability to be present with every single person and engage was a great model for me of the work that a writer needs to do. Writers, living or dead, still guide me in many ways. ~ Sandra Cisneros

I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable - and therefore understood. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

They say no matter how hard you work, there's always someone, somewhere working harder then you. Guess what.. I'm that someone ~ Kevin Garnett

A genius, huh? What does that mean? 'Genius'? So I was not born with a whole lot of natural talent, not gifted like Neji ... but I work hard and I never give up! That is my gift; that is my ninja way! ~ Masashi Kishimoto

Will had been ruined by fluke circumstances - wrong place, wrong time. And he wasn't only being robbed of his future, but also his past; all of his hard work, the respect of his family, his fiancee, career, and friends ... ~ Shane Stadler

What do I have? A life to live? Work to do? Children to raise, lands to rule, a woman to love? "You have nothing," finished Magister Illyrio, "but we can change that. ~ George R R Martin

What he taught was very simple. He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I try to say one thing with my work: A book is a wonderful place to be. A book is a package, a gift package, a surprise package-and within the wrappings is a whole new world and beyond. ~ Ellen Raskin

Think of a potter taking a misshapen bowl from his wheel and pounding it back into the tub of clay. A soul suffers while it is being pounded in this way, and suffers until it ceases to be. You are pounded down, and that which was you gets into something else. God tries again, and tries until the Work is complete. Meanwhile you, my son, are long gone ~ K.J. Bishop

My mother photographed Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas, right before he passed away. He was actually the first artist whose work I collected. I just loved the photographs that my mom had done of Donald Judd and the installations in Marfa. ~ Owen Wilson

After fifty years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or at the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth. ~ Thomas McGuane