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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."

"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 Howard Nemerov


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


"When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all."


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


"I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try."


"The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case."


"I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem."
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