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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."

"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."

"If the food that one ate the night before were somehow able to be seen and identified through one's clothes throughout the day, millions of employees would each fast ten or so days before their payday."

"Employees leave where they work. Employers live where they work."
Explore more quotes by Howard Nemerov


"When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats."


"I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks."


"Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree."


"I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow."


"It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page."


"I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us."


"History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without."


"I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early."
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