You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that–if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is– I wouldn’t give twopence for him’– here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers– ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do. .George Eliot
About This Quote
To be able to do your best in the work you love is important when it comes to making a living. However, when we convince ourselves that we must be doing something else in order to succeed, we miss the opportunity to do what we love and feel good about it. Instead, we get so focused on being someone else that we stop being ourselves. This results in a sense of emptiness.
We have our pride in our work and in learning to do it well. But, we also realize that what we are doing is not a source of shame. When a man does not do well what he undertakes, he is doing something else.
And, that is what matters most for him.
Source: Middlemarch
Some Similar Quotes
- Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you're wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore.
- Work without love is slavery.
- There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
- Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea...
- I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am...
More Quotes By George Eliot
- I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and...
- What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each...
- Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.' I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her...
- Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
- Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.