top of page
.png){kind=small}
"What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Work quotes
"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do."
"A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth."
"We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God's hand, as they came, as 'accidents'. But in the second week he is beginning to 'know the ropes': by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered."
"How many a rustic Milton has passed by Stifling the speechless longings of his heart In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies no longer tameless then To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!"
"The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions."
Explore more quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks
"When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water."
"A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers."
"Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?"
"I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge."
"Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else."
bottom of page