A Quote by Michael Korda
The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance.
Related Quotes
The fool is not the man who merely does foolish things. The fool is the man who does not know enough to cash in on his foolishness.
It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.
The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Perhaps there is a reason that there is no fool piece on the chessboard. What action, a fool? What strategy, a fool? What use, a fool? Ah, but a fool resides in a deck of cards, a joker, sometimes two. Of no worth, of course. No real purpose. The appearance of a trump, but none of the power: Simply an instrument of chance. Only a dealer may give value to the joker.
In this world the one thing supremely worth having is the opportunity to do well and worthily a piece of work of vital consequence to the welfare of mankind.
In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?
I set up a system, and the system can catch part of what is happening in the world - what's going on in the world - an appearance in the world, and suspend that appearance itself from being important.... The work is about the system.
I didn't know the odds were so stacked against me. I went for TV shows and never got them. But I kept glued to the pursuit. I was the biggest fool in town, but ultimately I was the biggest fool in town with a job.
If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.
The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
I made such a fool of myself,” she lamented. “Love does not make you a fool.” “He didn’t love me back.” “That does not make you a fool, either.” “Just tell me …” Her voice cracked. “When does it stop hurting?” “Sometimes never.
It is easy to fool yourself. It is possible to fool the people you work for. It is more difficult to fool the people you work with. But it is almost impossible to fool the people who work under you.
Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.
If a man is a fool, you don't train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.
At the 'Vanity Fair' New Establishment Summit, I asked Alibaba CEO Mike Evans - who has nine kids! - how he does it, as well as Didi President Jean Liu, a mother of three. Evans said he couldn't do work well without the support of his family and vice versa.
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