Work Refusal Quotes & Sayings

All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived. — Kim Stanley Robinson

One candle can light a thousand other candles and still remain lit itself. Be that candle. — James Altucher

I love you, Sinda," he said, not shakily but with certainty. "I have for--oh, years--before I even knew that I did. I loved you when you were the princess, and I love you now. I just want you to be happy. And I want you to be safe. I don't care if you're the Queen of Thorvaldor or a pig keeper in Mossfeld. — Eilis O'Neal

What has changed is that when I photographed, most people that I photographed didn't have the right of refusal on their work. It would take a Marilyn Monroe at her height to be able to dictate that. — Eve Arnold

We called [the] process photomontage, because it embodied our refusal to play the part of the artist. We regarded ourselves as engineers, and our work as construction: we assembled our work, like a fitter. — Raoul Hausmann

What's more insane? Hearing imaginary voices? Or not hearing the real ones? — Forrest Carr

In the most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable. — Susan Sontag

There was drinking. There was animalistic growling and squawking. There was vomiting. There were flows of excrement. Thus far, this was indistinguishable from most parliaments, but it was the refusal to get down to any real work that galled Satan. — Jonathan L. Howard

For me drive means a combination of a willingness to work hard, emotional fortitude, enormous powers of concentration and a refusal to admit defeat. At — Alex Ferguson

My business is not reading your messages. I don't have a business doing that. And it's against my values to do that. I don't want to read your private stuff. — Tim Cook

Would you expect a mutiny?' 'Mutiny in the sense of outright revolt and refusal of command? No. But from some of the people I expect muttering, discontent, ill-will; and nothing makes work slower or more inefficient or more unsafe than ill-will and its perpetual quarrels. — Patrick O'Brian

Some may object that to speak of election or predestination is to limit the kingdom of God to a few. Does it make God a capricious tyrant? We must answer that such objections usually stem from a refusal to accept that we are faced here with a mystery that is not given to us to solve. There is also a radical misunderstanding which maintains that God's sovereignty in election removes man's responsibility. Such is not true. How divine sovereignty and human responsibility work together we cannot know. The Bible makes it clear that they do. // Let us remember that Jesus discriminated and limited the numbers of the saved: 'Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it' (Matthew 7:13-14). This is in line with the Old Testament teaching that only a faithful remnant of Israel would be saved. — Graeme Goldsworthy

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. — Albert Camus

Penalties were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of employment to seek higher pay, and for the offer of higher pay by employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statute of Laborers. — Barbara W. Tuchman

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only ... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences ... — Doris Lessing

the public has two hopes, and Government makes two promises - many benefits and no taxes. Hopes and promises that, being contradictory, can never be realized. — Frederic Bastiat

Unless someone truly has the power to say no, they never truly have the power to say yes. — Dan Millman

Until there was Piper McCloud.
The probability of a flier is so rare, so completely out of the ordinary, and it was the very thing that Conrad needed to make an escape plan work. The minute he saw that Piper could fly, he knew hope. He carefully plotted and prepared for every eventuality except one
Piper's refusal to leave without the other's.
How can she be so colosally stupid??!! Didn't she understand? — Victoria Forester

Thought I wanted overnight success, until I achieved it through hard work and the refusal to back down! What you earn, you keep. — A.M. Hudson

I had a conversation with someone the other day who said he wondered if perhaps LGBT Christians had a special role to play in teaching the church how to more thoughtfully engage issues surrounding gender and sexuality. I told him I didn't think that went far enough, that ever since the Gay Christian Network conference, I've been convinced that LGBT Christians have a special role to play in teaching the church how to be Christian. Christians who tell each other the truth. Christians who confess our sins and forgive our enemies. Christians who embrace our neighbors. Christians who sit together in our pain, and in our healing, and wait for resurrection. — Rachel Held Evans

Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian. — Arthur Koestler

My worry about the New York Times is that it's got the only position as a national elitist general-interest paper. So the network news picks up its cues from the Times. And local papers do too. It has a huge influence. And we'd love to challenge it. — Rupert Murdoch

Standard economics assumes that we are rational ... But, as the results presented in this book (and others) show, we are far less rational in our decision making ... Our irrational behaviors arevneither random nor senseless- they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of he basic wiring of our brains.-pg. 239 — Dan Ariely

drive means a combination of a willingness to work hard, emotional fortitude, enormous powers of concentration and a refusal to admit defeat. — Alex Ferguson

Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one's life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being. — Walter Brueggemann

A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, "How did I do it?" The real artist's work is a surprise to himself. — Robert Henri

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. — Susan Sontag

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms. — Mirra Ginsburg

What the recognition of all this means is not only that the class struggle is omnipresent but also that the struggles of those of us who are waged and the struggles of those of us who are unwaged are inherently related through the common refusal of work, that is, the refusal of the reduction of our lives to work, and the struggle for alternative ways of being. Thus the Old Left definition of the working class as the waged proletariat is obsolete, not only because capital has integrated the unwaged into its self-reproduction, but also because the struggles of the unwaged are integrally related to, and can be complementary to, those of the waged. — Harry Cleaver

He was my Huckleberry, my Han Solo, my one, but most of all he was my Becks and I was his Sal. That was the truth. It — Cookie O'Gorman

In relation to the natural world, the pleasure of Americans can be destructive in the same way that their work has already proved to be. It is not, certainly, a conscious destructiveness. But in that very unconsciousness it becomes an aspect of one of our worst national failings: our refusal to admit the need to be conscious. Or to put it more meaningfully: our refusal to admit that unconsciousness, in our time, is almost inevitably destructive. — Wendell Berry

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears. — Lord Alfred Douglas

Draw a line in your mind. Never cross it again. You have a soul. It's damaged, but it's there. Don't let them take it from you, Elias. — Sabaa Tahir

My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential. — Noam Chomsky