A Job to Love Quotes

“(the people we call great writers are in the end merely people who’ve known how to manipulate the butterfly nets required to catch their own flightiest, airiest, shyest thoughts).”
― The School of Life, A Job to Love

“One of the most extraordinary and yet quietly routine features of our age is the assumption that we should be able to find work that we not only tolerate, or endure for the money, but profoundly appreciate, for its high degree of purpose, camaraderie and creativity. We see nothing strange in the remarkable notion that we should try to find a job we love.”
― The School of Life, A Job to Love

“Now, because of the new ideology of work, neither was quite acceptable any longer. The two ambitions – money and inner fulfilment – were being asked to coalesce. Good work meant, essentially, work that tapped into the deepest parts of the self and could generate a product or service that would pay for one’s material needs. This dual demand has ushered in a particular difficulty of modern life: that we must simultaneously pursue two very complicated ambitions, although these are far from inevitably aligned. We need to satisfy the soul and pay for our material existence.”
― The School of Life, A Job to Love

“It's humbling to recognise just how many great achievements have been the result not of superior talent or technical know-how, but merely of that strange buoyancy of the soul we call confidence. And this sense of confidence is ultimately nothing more than an internalised version of the confidence other people once had in us.”
― The School of Life, A Job to Love

“The feudal mind, which can exist in any class, imagines that others will invariably know better, and that the task is to obey. The aristocratic mind, which one doesn’t need to be an earl to have, allows that, despite all those who have come before, it might still be in charge of a major discovery.”
― The School of Life, A Job to Love

“What would baby chimpanzees look like if they were shaved?”
― The School of Life, A Job to Love

“A small but significant echo of this attitude can be traced in our habit of asking even very young children what they want to be when they grow up. There’s a faint but revealing assumption that somewhere in the options being entertained by the child (footballer, zookeeper, space explorer, etc.), there will already be the first stumbling articulations of the crucial inner voice announcing the small person’s true destiny. It appears not to strike us as peculiar to expect a five-and-a-half-year-old to understand their identity in the adult labour market.”
― The School of Life, A Job to Love