... we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and pr...oviding for their bundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of "making a living;" such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly. The only exception society is willing to grant is to the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only "worker" left in a laboring society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what... from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the perso...n of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Helicon: "It takes one day to make a senator and ten years to make a worker." Caligula: "But I am afraid that it takes twenty... years to make a worker out of a senator."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Recent studies that have investigated maternal satisfaction have found this to be a better prediction of mother-child interaction ...than work status alone. More important for the overall quality of interaction with their children than simply whether the mother works or not, these studies suggest, is how satisfied the mother is with her role as worker or homemaker. Satisfied women are consistently more warm, involved, playful, stimulating and effective with their children than unsatisfied women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Juggling produces both practical and psychological benefits.... A woman's involvement in one role can enhance her functioning in a...nother. Being a wife can make it easier to work outside the home. Being a mother can facilitate the activities and foster the skills of the efficient wife or of the effective worker. And employment outside the home can contribute in substantial, practical ways to how one works within the home, as a spouse and as a parent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A sche...dule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order--willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You'd have to be a jew like me to understand. You've heard of the Pale. Every one of us has something fenced up way down in us. We...'ve been in prison for two thousand years. I have the mind of a jailbird, that's why prison can't hurt me. That's why we throw ourselves into every movement of freedom. That's why I feel the slavery of the workers, I feel it as a worker and I feel it as a jew. Oh you can't imagine the overheated stuffiness of life at home on the East Side when I was a kid. We were all jailed in poverty and Judaism and in old customs and hatreds and wornout laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself with his hands and his head. With him is no mi...racle, and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money, and in troops, and a very consistent and wise master-workman. He is never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with things. Men give way before such a man, as before natural events.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I was in grade school and we had to write papers about what we wanted to be when we grew up, I wanted to be a social worker o...r a missionary or a teacher. Then I got involved with tennis, and everything was just me, me, me. I was totally selfish and thought about myself and nobody else, because if you let up for one minute, someone was going to come along and beat you. I really wouldn't let anyone or any slice of happiness enter.... I didn't like the characteristics that it took to become a champion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »