Work's a curse, Saturno. I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation — that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno — I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it! —Luis Bunuel More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Where the whole man is involved, there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor. —Marshall McLuhan More about this quote Tags: labor work Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
I signed up with a temp agency, and much to my dismay they actually found me a job. It had been a couple of years since I'd worked in an office, so I thought I should prepare for it. I went to the ymca with a friend and had him tie me up in a burlap sack and sink me to the bottom of the pool. Just as I was about to suffocate, he yanked me up and gave me a lunch break. —Martha Kelly More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years. —C. Wright Mills More about this quote Tags: work fate capitalism Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The trouble with the profit system has always been that it is highly unprofitable to most people. —E. B. White More about this quote Tags: equality capitalism Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price. —Kahlil Gibran More about this quote Tags: time work value price Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
If we think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, we see that we are the earth; we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth. —Joseph Campbell More about this quote Tags: perspective eyes earth consciousness Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Beneath the veneer of civilization . . . lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human: birth in gentle surroundings, a rich nonhuman environment, juvenile tasks with simple tools, . . . play at being animals, . . . clan membership and small-group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. There is a secret person undamaged in each of us, aware of the validity of these conditions, sensitive to their right moments in our lives. —Paul Shepard More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The time in our own life when we came closest to being convinced by silence was one time at sea in a light fall of snow. We heard nothing — no gravel, no wind, no waves, no wolves, no bell buoy. It was convincing and it was beautiful. —E. B. White More about this quote Tags: beauty silence quiet convincing Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. . . . Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. —Jean Arp More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The idea that we are "stewards of the earth" is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body's physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? . . . Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries? . . . We are unconscious of most of our body's processes, thank goodness, because we'd screw it up if we weren't. The human body is so complex, with so many parts. . . . The idea that we are consciously caretaking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous. —Lynn Margulis More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel. —Loudon Wainwright III More about this quote Tags: nature water Thoreau Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. —Henry David Thoreau More about this quote Tags: life simplicity simplify Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions upon them, and name them the Willows, or Peregrine's Roost, or Elk Meadows, after whatever it was that got killed there. Apparently, it's hard for us humans to doubt, even for a minute, that this program of plunking down our edifices at regular intervals over the entire landmass of planet Earth is overall a good idea. —Barbara Kingsolver More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email