Work Quotes

AMBITION

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better

place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap

out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you

made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
—Charles Bukowski, Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975




EIGHT HOURS

"One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't

eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours—all you can do for eight hours is work.

Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy."
—William Faulkner, interview in Writers at Work, 1958



MENTAL DERANGEMENT

"Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform

velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement."
—Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 1944



COMPOST

"But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate,

commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in the old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will

corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not

before."
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854