Workman Quotes

1. "The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence."
Author: Adam Smith

2. "Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Nassau … all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation."
Author: Alain De Botton

3. "It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak; and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens."
Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

4. "The territorial aristocracy of former ages was either bound by law, or thought itself bound by usage, to come to the relief of its serving-men and to relieve their distress. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public. This is a natural consequence of what has been said before. Between the workman and the master there are frequent relations, but no real association.I am of the opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous. Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter."
Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

5. "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."
Author: Antonin Artaud

6. "You see...I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that he knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent."
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

7. "My movies are unadorned, they're not particularly fancy, I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting."
Author: Ben Affleck

8. "We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely."
Author: C.S. Lewis

9. "God abides in men""God abides in men,These are men who are simple,they are fields of corn...Such men have mindslike wide grey skies,they have the grandeurthat the fools call emptiness.God abides in men.Some men are not simple,they live in citiesamong the teeming buildings,wrestling with forcesas strong as the sun and the rain.Often they must forgo dream upon dream...Christ walks in the wildernessin such lives.God abides in men,because Christ has put onthe nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.He has put on everyone's life...to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...Christ has put on Man's nature,and given him back his humanness...God abides in man."
Author: Caryll Houselander

10. "I keep trying, and manage some workmanlike stuff that doesn't require inspiration, and then I check my phone, check my email, go on Facebook. I read other people's posts, make jaunty comments, flitter away the time, profane the time."
Author: Deborah Meyler

11. "I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman."
Author: Evelyn Waugh

12. "Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace."
Author: Frederick W. Taylor

13. "There's no workman, whatsoever he be, That may both work well and hastily."
Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

14. "And earth was given back to earth, to mingle with the rest of the stuff the great workman works withal."
Author: George MacDonald

15. "The great workman of nature is time."
Author: Georges Louis Leclerc

16. "If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more."
Author: Gregory Peck

17. "Two avenues of approach to these rewards lie open to the ambitious fictioneer. On the one hand, he may throw all intelligible standards of merit to the winds, and devote himself to manufacturing new stories that are frankly bad, trusting to the fact that nine persons out of ten are utterly devoid of esthetic sense and hence unable to tell the bad from the good. And on the other hand, he may take stories, or parts of stories that have been told before, or that, in themselves, are scarcely worth the telling, and so encrust them with the ornaments of wit, of shrewd observation, of human sympathy and of style--in brief, so develop them--that readers of good taste will forget the unsoundness of the material in admiration of the ingenious and workmanlike way in which it is handled."
Author: H.L. Mencken

18. "Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx."
Author: H.P. Lovecraft

19. "Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

20. "It ought to be the employer's ambition as leader to pay than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman's ambition to make it possible"
Author: Henry Ford

21. "A pair of workman's brogans encased my feet, and for trousers I was furnished with a pair of pale blue, washed-out overalls, one leg of which was fully ten inches shorter than the other. The abbreviated leg looked as though the devil had there clutched for the Cockney's soul and missed the shadow for the substance."
Author: Jack London

22. "When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman."
Author: Jean De La Bruyère

23. "By the work one knows the workman."
Author: Jean De La Fontaine

24. "Beauty is nature's brag, and must be shown in courts, at feasts, and high solemnities, where most may wonder at the workmanship."
Author: John Milton

25. "It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled."
Author: John Ruskin

26. "High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life."
Author: Joseph Epstein

27. "A woman with a voice like that should have the face of an angel, the body of a Greek sculpture, and the skills of a courtesan. Chances were, she was a haggard old crone.The hulking workman began to gather his tools. "I hope ye and yer pa know what ye're doin'. Fop or no, no man takes well to losin' his belongings.""Psht," the woman said airily. "It's not as if we plan on knocking him in the head and peeling his pockets."That was something,at least, Dougal thought grimly."
Author: Karen Hawkins

28. "I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman."
Author: Laurence Olivier

29. "Workers must root out the idea that by keeping the results of their labors to themselves a fortune will be assured to them. Patent fees are so much wasted money. The flying machine of the future will not be born fully fledged and capable of a flight for 1,000 miles or so. Like everything else it must be evolved gradually. The first difficulty is to get a thing that will fly at all. When this is made, a full description should be published as an aid to others. Excellence of design and workmanship will always defy competition. (1894)"
Author: Lawrence Hargrave

30. "There would be no idling in a co-operative workshop. Each workman, being an employer, has a spur to his own industry, and has a pecuniary reason for being watchful of the industry of his fellow workmen."
Author: Leland Stanford

31. "When some people say, as they do, that when we preach faith alone good works are forbidden, it is as if I were to say to a sick man, "If you had health you would have the full use of all your limbs, but without health the works of all your limbs are nothing," and from this he wanted to infer that I had forbidden the works of his limbs. Whereas on the contrary I meant that the health must first be there to work all the works of all his limbs. In the same way faith must be the master-workman and captain in all the works, or they are nothing at all."
Author: Martin Luther

32. "Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the Greeks would say) an end in itself."
Author: Oscar Wilde

33. "Common sense is in medicine the master workman."
Author: Peter Latham

34. "There she was, lying on a single bed in a room so small that there wasn't even space for a chair, and the first thing that struck him was that she was beautiful. She had lost too much weight - her long legs were too thin in greasy jeans and her upper body looked as frail as a bird's under a greasy workman's shirt - but her pale and famished face, with its great blue eyes and delicate, thin-lipped mouth, made her look like the heartbreaking debutante her mother might always have wanted her to be."
Author: Richard Yates

35. "Hephaestus glowered up at us. "I didn't make you, did I?"Uh," Annabeth said, "no, sir."Good," the god grumbled. "Shoddy workmanship."
Author: Rick Riordan

36. "At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives."
Author: Robert Farrar Capon

37. "We must never undervalue any person. The workman loves not that his work should be despised in his presence. Now God is present everywhere, and every person is His work."
Author: Saint Francis De Sales

38. "It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being "modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to "reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory."
Author: Seraphim Rose

39. "The workman cut to the left, still laying on his horn, and roared around the drunkenly weaving limousine. He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo driver's soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limodriver's mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution."
Author: Stephen King

40. "The sullen workman who is afraid of being imposed upon is secretly convinced of his own inferiority--when he has to say, or think, "I'm as good as any man," he doesn't quite believe it himself."
Author: Sydney J. Harris

41. "George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise."
Author: Thomas Hardy

42. "[A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools."
Author: Thomas Jefferson

43. "Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Excerpt taken from On the Art of Fiction by Willa Cather circa 1920."
Author: Willa Cather

Workman Quotes Pictures