Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.
Interpretation
Finding the right job is a deep and personal journey.
This quote emphasizes that the right kind of work is not merely about earning a livelihood; it is an exploration of one's identity and purpose. When we find work that resonates with our true selves, it feels as though we are unearthing our soul, connecting our passions and values with what we do in the world.
In practice
During a career workshop, I shared this quote to inspire attendees to seek their passions.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
In an ideal world, nobody's work would be just about the money. People could pursue excellence in what they do, take pride in achievement, and derive meaning from knowing that their work improved the lives of others.
Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn't you have fun at work?
I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don't do anything. I just sort of have lunch - all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.
Bring your whole self to work. I don't believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional and it is all personal.
Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.