Wendell Berry Quotes

Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.

I could work 24 hours and I wouldn't complain once because I'm happiest when I'm working.

People complain about not having a social life and always working. But I enjoy working.

You may be exhausted with work, you may even kill yourself, but unless your work is interwoven with love, it is useless. To work without love is slavery.

Let work itself be the ambition.

God intends no man to live in this world without working, but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work.

I'm not the "not-working" type. I derive pleasure from my work. Work gives me relaxation too. Every moment I am thinking of something new: making a new plan, new ways to work. In the same way that a scientist draws pleasure from long hours in the laboratory, I draw pleasure in governance, in doing new things and bringing people together. That pleasure is sufficient for me.

I love what I do. I'm even loving politically what I do. I'm having a lot of fun. It's a lot of work but I love - it's called Make America great Again.

Work is often the father of pleasure.

If you live in America, you don't have to work. You can just drift along in the smiling and nodding racket.

If you work without love, you are working like a slave. When you work with love, you work like an emperor. Your work is your joy, your work is your dance.

There is nothing more marvelous than doing something you love to do and getting paid for it. It ceases to become work, money, and effort; and it becomes fun, your expression of the joy of life.

Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.

Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.

I don't want to think my life as a career. I'm interested in my work only because of the meaning I can make.

It is not hard work that is dreary; it is superficial work.

The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor find much fun in life.

I don't have to work another day of my life, thank God, but I'm in a place where I probably work as hard or harder today than I ever have, but I do it because I want to, not because I have to. What is the difference between work and play? I think the difference is purpose. When your vocation becomes your vacation, the old quote, you know that's when you made it.

Labor humanizes, exalts.

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one's big and second toes; there's work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving.

In the Great Society, work shall be an outlet for mans interests and desires. Each individual shall have full opportunity to use his capacities in employment which satisfies personally and contributes generally to the quality of the Nations life.

The workman still is greater than his work.

I want our children in America to know the limits of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.

To have meaningful work is a tremendous happiness.