“Work: work doesn’t solve everything but when a person is practicing the work that he loves, you can always tell; there is a rhythm in their absorption which shows in the eyes; their eyes glitter with sights brought back from private places: when the right words come together the world becomes at that moment mathematically perfect: so with each stitch of the cobbler’s machine, the tailor’s needle. They are seeing unity, peace, in some tiny fragment of the world and they know that this fragment is themselves.”
—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin [vol 5, 1947–1955] (New York: First Harvest, 1975), 172.

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“Blessed is the man who has found his work, blessed is the man to whom his work appeals with so much interest that he goes from it with a longing to be able to finish what he has been at, and comes back to it with a prospect that now he shall be able to accomplish what time and perhaps fatigue would not allow him to proceed with the day before.”
—James Joseph Walsh, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries (New York: Catholic Summer School Press, 1907), 125.

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“When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.”
—Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 78.