Tao Te Ching
Livelihood
In spite of common opinion, happiness seems to come much more from discovering our skills and using them for a greater good rather than pursuing a mythical pleasure from leisure. The idea of "retirement" is a scam deluding people into sacrificing the meaningfulness of their careers for this illusion. Our infatuation with vacations, weekends, and retirement is the result of a propaganda campaign during the age of industrialization and rapid population growth to deal with unemployment. Governments wanted to minimize the discontent of jobless youth by tricking older people into obscurity, pointless dependence, and abandoning this most basic source of our true happiness. This kind of personal fulfillment from work however, can't be based on a desire for external respect, approval, or fame; for riches, pleasure, or power which are only popular ways of selling souls to a Faustian devil. It only arises when our work expresses our authentic selves, our innermost passions, and benefits the world beyond personal gain.
Quotes (128)
“It is best to work, at whatever you have a talent for doing, without turning your greedy thought toward what some other man possesses, but take care of your own livelihood… it is from work that men are rich, a working man is much dearer to the immortals.”
“To keep a constant mind-and-heart of goodness without a constant, meaningful livelihood is only possible for a very few. If people lack a good livelihood, it follows that they will lack a good mind and heart; will become reckless, depraved, and stop at nothing. Only hypocritical, greedy, and criminal leaders create the causes of crime and then punish the people for it.”
“If the people do not have a minimum level of livelihood, they will not have a fixed heart and there will be nothing they will not do—self-abandonment, moral deflection, depravity, wild license.”
“Once you start working on something don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.”
“And whatever you do—remain in the world as artisan, merchant, politician, or religious recluse—put your whole heart into the task.”
“Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.”
“day in working for food and clothes
year out worrying about rent and taxes
thousands fight for a coin
the crowd yells ‘run for your life’”
“Work is for the purification of the mind, not for the perception of Reality. The realization of Truth is brought about by discrimination, and not in the least by millions of acts.”
“Painting and sculpture, labor and good faith have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better would it have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.”
“People only know the work of working. They don’t know that the work of not working is the greatest work of all… If they knew that something came from nothing, they would no longer enslave themselves to things.”
“All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.”
“It is intolerable when an office engrosses someone with fixed hours and a settle routine... better to leave people free to follow their devices combining variety with importance.”
“become necessary to your office instead of letting your office remain necessary to you”
“the greatest evil in heaven and on earth: they pass through the world without doing any useful work and are thus great thieves”
“Let us work without theorizing, 'tis the only way to make life endurable. Man was not born for idleness and work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
“Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labor for labor, the value of all things is most justly measured by labor.”
“Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased... Labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.”
“Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”
“No blessing is equal to the blessings of work. To know and practice a craft lends greater culture than half-knowledge, a hundred times over.”
“People who know how to employ themselves, always find leisure moments, while those who do nothing are forever in a hurry.”
“I worked for a menial hire, only to learn dismayed, that any wage I had asked of life, life would have willingly paid.”
“Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.”
“If the people can attain a fair compensation for their labor, they will have good homes, good clothing, and good food. the great interest of this country is labor.”
“'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell”
“Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.”
“The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness.”
“Archimedes and Kant are as much realists as blacksmiths: they deal with intellections as vigorously and drastically as the joiner with his chisel and board”
“I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts — the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.”
“As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.”
“The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.”
“All of us are slaves… landsmen pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks”
“Labor without joy is base. Labor without sorrow is base. Joy without labor is base.”
“To do a good day's work and do it well he held to be part of their welfare, as it was the chief part of his own happiness”
“How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn't care about careers,
And exigencies never fears.”
“'Water Lilies' is an extension of my life. Without the water, the lilies cannot live, as I am without art.”
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work… Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
“Folks who never do any more than they get paid for, never get paid for any more than they do.”
“To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.”
“What right have you, save service to the world, to think that other men's labor should contribute to your gains?”
“with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need — this life is hell.”
“The world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.”
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
“At that point in life where your talent meets the needs of the world, that is where God wants you to be.”
“The vocation—whether it be that of the farmer or the architect—is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth.”
“When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music... Work is love made visible.”
“And if you can't work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy.”
“One thing only we pursued all our lives: a harsh, carnivorous, indestructible vision—the essence... We're not working for pay, we have no desire for a daily wage. We are warring in the empty air, beyond hope, beyond paradise!”
“They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.”
“We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.”
“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.”
“Let us ask the Gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than consuming them.”
“The unemployed should be used by federal and state governments in works of social utility and environmental improvement.”
“Our civilization being what it is, you've got to spend eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine… It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it… Do the job then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman.”
“happiness comes from work and from the feeling of joy and peace when a job is well done... making things, producing things, and getting something done which we may be proud of, is the best reward of this life.”
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.”
“We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.”
“An educational system that aims at vocational training or social adjustment, or technological advance is not likely to lead to the kind of maturity that the present crisis demands… a country that is powerful, inexperienced, and uneducated can be a great danger to world peace.”
“Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers.”
“I didn’t want a steady job in an office or factory. I thought myself too good for that not because I was stuck up but simply because any human being is too good for that kind of no-life, even white people.”
“One can clearly see here that Buddhism is strongly opposed to any kind of war, when it lays down that trade in arms and lethal weapons is an evil and unjust means of livelihood.”
“That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”
“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
“Without work, all life goes rotten but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”
“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.”
“When technology is used to increase employment rather than get rid of it, work becomes an artificial creation of ever more meaningless routines”
“Scratch an incompetent schoolteacher—or, for that matter, college professor—and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason.”
“The quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed.”
“Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce [meaningful] work”
“People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands… the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.”
“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
“Work is not an infinite player's way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a away of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.”
“The future of business? – A faster and faster transition from the mechanical, rote, and unskilled to the innovative, educated and personal as technology, computers, and robots assume bigger and bigger roles.”
“'Selling our souls to the devil' is just a dramatic way of saying 'trading our time for money.'”
“Henry Ford modeled his assembly line car production after visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse… and immediately saw that it was a perfect model for the automobile industry… Later, the Nazis used the same slaughterhouse model for their mass murders in the concentration camps… Ford openly admired the Nazis' efficiency. Hitler returned the admiration… and kept a life-sized portrait of the automobile mogul in his office.”
“a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.”
“We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.”
“80 percent of success is showing up — my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.”
“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.”
“Work is one of the most important sources of happiness — not at all a curse as the Bible teaches.”
“A student of politics is anyone who is seeking to be aware of people's problems in making a living and developing a way of life. Knowledge of people's livelihoods and their psychological attitudes towards their living situations is absolutely necessary to skillful action.”
“He hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime, he asks you with a grin if you're havin' a good time... I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more”
“For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Do what they do just to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.”
“I think what everyone should be doing, before it's too late, is committing themselves to what they really want to do with their lives.”
“How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say?”
“Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around but also… self-reproducing… They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything.”
“A people inspired by democracy, human rights and economic opportunity will turn their back decisively against extremism.”
“The postwar emphasis on mass production means workers are valued for their ability to perform a single, mindless task, not for their unique skills. The individual is devalued... The fast food industry pays the minimum wage to a higher proportion of its workers than any other American industry.”
“Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.”
“In a culture obsessed with hard work and career success, it can be difficult to wean ourselves off the work ethic. And we may not want to if we are engrossed in a career that is making us feel fully alive. But if we do seek the space to nurture other parts of who we are, then we might be wise to put our hopes in the virtues of simple living”
“I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break… So it's all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.”
“‘proper work’ usually involves performing a task you hate on behalf of people you'd gleefully club to death with a bull's knee if only it were legal to do so.”
“Our jobs are literally killing us… seven times more people die each year from heart disease and cancer than all the people murdered in a decade.”
“The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs. GPs who focus on diagnosing known diseases and administering familiar treatments will probably be replaced by AI doctors. But precisely because of that, there will be much more money to pay human doctors and lab assistants to do groundbreaking research and develop new medicines or surgical procedures.”
“guided by the principle of protecting humans rather than jobs... we need to develop new social and economic models as soon as possible... Many jobs are uninspiring drudgery and are not worth saving. Nobody's life's dream is to be a cashier.”
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