“If you’re given the tools, you have a responsibility to use them. I’m doing what I’m cut out to do, the best thing I can do, until they throw dirt on me.”

Kris Kristofferson

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“In the workplace, givers are a relatively rare breed. They tilt reciprocity in the other direction, preferring to give more than they get. Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them. These preferences aren’t about money: givers and takers aren’t distinguished by how much they donate to charity or the compensation that they command from their employers. Rather, givers and takers differ in their attitudes and actions toward other people. If you’re a taker, you help others strategically, when the benefits to you outweigh the personal costs. If you’re a giver, you might use a different cost-benefit analysis: you help whenever the benefits to others exceed the personal costs. Alternatively, you might not think about the personal costs at all, helping others without expecting anything in return. If you’re a giver at work, you simply strive to be generous in sharing your time, energy, knowledge, skills, ideas, and connections with other people who can benefit from them.”

Adam Grant

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“As I’ve gone through life, I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old…At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you ‘should’ be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself.”

Walter Murch

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“I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, ‘Where did it all go? Where are they now?’ It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.”

Michael Bierut

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“Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve / And Hope without an object cannot live.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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“People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder. I knew I would be a librarian in college as a student assistant at a reference desk, watching those lovely people at work. ‘I don’t think there’s such a book—’ a patron would begin, and then the librarian would hand it to them, that very book.”

Elizabeth McCracken

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“The more I reveal myself, the harder my job becomes. And so that’s always the challenge: how to preserve myself and how to retain mystique so that people can suspend disbelief when I choose odd terrain.”

Vera Farmiga

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“I got married and moved to Memphis, got an apartment, started trying to sell appliances at a place called Home Equipment Company. But I couldn’t sell anything and didn’t really want to. All I wanted was the music, and if somebody in the house was playing music when I would come, I would stop and sing with them.”

Johnny Cash

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“The great thing about writing a book is that it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already. It’s this dialectical process that makes me glad I chose the profession I did: a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”

Christopher Hitchens

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“I didn’t know what I could or couldn’t do and therefore thought I could do anything. In this sense, I was a person that did what I didn’t know I couldn’t do.”

Eriko Horiki

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“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.'”

Martin Luther King, Jr

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“I have a respect for people who do things with their brains and with their hands, who are not afraid of hard physical and mental work. I respect, too, people who are unpretentious yet mannerly, considerate and honest, forthright yet kind and tactful. I dislike display and foolish expenditure in the sense of what Veblen called ‘conspicuous waste,’ that is, spending to impress those who have less, as well as to impress associates. I dislike chi-chi.”

Amy Vanderbilt

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“Be careful what you get good at doin’ ’cause you’ll be doin’ it for the rest of your life.”

Jo Carson

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“Nothing that year was sweeter than buying villagers we liked a pastis with money we earned working their land. If you can work in Provence, even for a single day, you should do it.”

Richard Goodman

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“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Henry James

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