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Quote by Gary Paulsen

“That's how his grandfather always talked about work - you didn't just work so many hours or days. You worked a job to done. All the way to done. No matter how long it took.”

Quote by Gary Paulsen

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Gary Paulsen
Gary Paulsen

Gary Paulsen is a renowned American writer, born on May 17, 1939. His works primarily focus on young adult literature and have gained great popularity among readers. Paulsen's writing style is unique, adept at conveying life philosophies through stories. more

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“As I pointed out, feudalism is essentially a redistributive system. Peasants and craftsmen produce things to a large extent autonomously; lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions ("direct-juro-political extraction" is the technical phrase I learned in college), and then go about portioning out shares of the loot to their own staff, flunkies, warriors, retainers - and to a lesser extent, by sponsoring feasts and festivals and by occasional gifts and favours, giving some of it back to the craftsmen and peasants once again. In such an arrangement, it makes little sense to speak of separate spheres of "politics" and "the economy" because the goods are extracted through political means and distributed for political purposes.”

“Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of - as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it - "a life," and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford.”

“For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.”

“As I pointed out, feudalism is essentially a redistributive system. Peasants and craftsmen produce things to a large extent autonomously; lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions ("direct-juro-political extraction" is the technical phrase I learned in college), and then go about portioning out shared of the loot to their own staff, flunkies, warriors, retainers - and to a lesser extent, by sponsoring feasts and festivals and by occasional gifts and favours, giving some of it back to the craftsmen and peasants once again. In such an arrangement, it makes little sense to speak of separate spheres of "politics" and "the economy" because the goods are extracted through political means and distributed for political purposes.”

“In his book "Being Mortal", the surgeon Atul Gawande accurately describes the joy that flows from being good at your work. 'You become a doctor for what you imagine to be the satisfaction of the work, and that turns out to be the satisfaction of competence,' Dr. Gawande writes. 'It is a deep satisfaction very much like the one that a carpenter experiences in restoring a fragile antique chest...It comes partly from being helpful to others. But it also comes from being technically skilled and able to solve difficult, intricate problems. Your competence gives you a secure sense of identity.”