Drudgery Quotes - Page 2

Too much of our work amounts to the drudgery of arranging means toward ends, mechanically placing the right foot in front of the left and the left in front of the right, moving down narrow corridors toward narrow goals. Play widens the halls. Work will always be with us, and many works are worthy. But the worthiest works of all often reflect an artful creativity that looks more like play than work.

James Ogilvy

Inspirational, Moving, Creativity

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And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Max Ehrmann

Beautiful, Dream, Broken

Max Ehrmann (2003). “Desiderata: A Survival Guide for Life”, p.10, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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This old notion that work is drudgery is nonsense. Most days, even back when Xerox was under siege, I could not wait to get to the office.

Ursula Burns

Office, Waiting, Siege

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Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

Simone de Beauvoir

Retirement, Work, Holiday

Simone de Beauvoir (1972). “La vieillesse”

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So many people imagine housekeeping to be boring, frustrating, repetitive, unintelligent drudgery. I cannot agree. In fact, having kept house, practiced law, taught, and done many other sorts of work, low and high-paid, I can assure you that it is actually lawyers who are most familiar with the experience of unintelligent drudgery.

Cheryl Mendelson

Law, People, House

Cheryl Mendelson (2005). “Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

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To me, the kitchen is a place of adventure and entirely fun, not drudgery. I can't think of anything better to do with family and friends than to be together to create something.

Ted Allen

Fun, Adventure, Thinking

"Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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It's sad but true that if you focus your attention on housework and meal preparation and diapers, raising children does start to look like drudgery pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you see yourself as nothing less than your child's nurturer, role model, teacher, spiritual guide, and mentor, your days take on a very different cast.

Joyce Maynard

Spiritual, Teacher, Children

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My best work is always done... when I'm experimenting. If I stop experimenting I feel it just becomes a drudgery.

William Dobell

Done, Best Work, Feels

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In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.

James Henry Hammond

Skills, Order, Civilization

James Henry Hammond (1866). “Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond: Of South Carolina”, p.318

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Your drudgery is another person's delight. It's only a job if you treat it that way. The privilege to do our work, to be in control of the promises we make and the things we build, is something worth cherishing.

Seth Godin

Jobs, Promise, Delight

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Man is still by instinct a predatory animal given to devilish aggression. The discoveries of science have immensely increased productivity of material things. They have increased the standards of living and comfort. They have eliminated infinite drudgery. They have increased leisure. But that gives more time for devilment. The work of science has eliminated much disease and suffering. It has increased the length of life. That, together with increase in productivity, has resulted in vastly increased populations. Also it increased the number of people engaged in devilment.

Herbert Hoover

Life, Science, Animal

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Piano is like drudgery.

Warren Zevon

Piano

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All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little-something which they value for more than its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life.

Theodore Parker

Men, Needs, Use

Theodore Parker (1855). “Ten Sermons of Religion”, p.119

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For me, the kitchen is the most special room in the house. It's a place for adventure - not drudgery, but discovery, sharing and showing off with friends, trying new ideas.

Ted Allen

Adventure, Discovery, Ideas

Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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I'm really trying to respond to the foods that are in the stores and just pulling the things that are the very best and cook what looks beautiful and is seasonal. That's the way to go. I love going to the grocery store and the market. None of it's drudgery for me. Washing dishes is the drudgery.

Ted Allen

Beautiful, Trying, Looks

Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.

Herbert Marcuse

Progress, Culture, Satisfaction

Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.78, Beacon Press

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Coaches should realize that the only way to conquer drudgery is by getting through it as efficiently as they can. A dull job slackly done becomes twice as dull, whereas a dull job performed as efficiently as possible becomes half as dull. Effort appears to be the main art of living.

Harold Nicolson

Sports, Art, Jobs

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When the physicists ask us for the solution of a problem, it is not drudgery that they impose on us, on the contrary, it is us who owe them thanks.

Henri Poincare

Science, Thanks, Problem

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A kiss with the right person simply can't be compared to the drudgery of sleeping with the wrong one over and over.

Carolyn Crane

Sleep, Kissing, Persons

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The thing that makes 'Dirty Jobs' different is that it's one of the few shows that portrays work in a way that doesn't highlight the drudgery. Instead, it highlights the humor.

Mike Rowe

Jobs, Dirty, Different

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Children, as well as grown-ups, in their individual, glorified, drudgery-proof homes of Labrador, the tropics, the Orient, or where you will, to which they can pass with pleasure and expedition by means of ever-improving transportation, will be able to tune in their television and radio to the moving picture lecture of, let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Children, Moving, Mean

"4D Timelock". Book by Buckminster Fuller, 1928.

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I can't relate to the process of just disappearing and writing a record, all at the same time, followed by the sort of drudgery of going out on tour and trying to recreate the record, playing the same 12 songs every night.

Andrew Bird

Song, Writing, Night

Interview with Joshua Klein, pitchfork.com. May 22, 2007.

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To lift farm drudgery off flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant ambition

Henry Ford

Ambition, Blood, Steel

Henry Ford (2015). “My Life and Work: Top Biography”, p.18, 谷月社

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Nothing less than the majesty of God, and the powers of the world to come, can maintain the peace and sanctity of our homes, the order and serenity of our minds, the spirit of patience and tender mercy in our hearts. Then will even the merest drudgery of duty cease to humble us, when we transfigure it by the glory of our own spirit.

James Martineau

Home, Heart, Humble

James Martineau (1844). “Endeavors After the Christian Life: A Volume of Discourses”, p.37

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In the usual way I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of "normal" work. In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer. It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does.

Tanith Lee

Jobs, Children, Stupid

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