A manager of a certain level has obligations not only in relation to the company but also to himself. He must look after and cherish his career like Christ does for the Church, or the wife for her husband.

 —Michel Houellenbecq, The Map and the Territory

It was a pleasure to see him handle a tool of any kind, but he was quite splendid with an eighteen inch file.

—An old workman from Henry Maudslay's shop, quoted in Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

To keep time was once a peculiar attribute of music: it gave industrial value to the workshop song or the tattoo or the chantey of the sailors tugging at a rope. But the effect of the mechanical clock is more pervasive and strict: it presides over the day from the hour of rising to the hour of rest. When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter's night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

I love artists and creative people. They make me crazy, but they're rarely boring. When they do get boring, it's because they are working on something they are so passionate about that they become obsessive. An artist caught up in an idea is like an eighteen-wheeler stuck in the sand, just grinding its wheels over and over. It can go on for months! But even when they are boring this way, it is fascinating because being passionate and obsessive is still an intense way of being alive and present to the beauty and complexity of life. When you're around artists, you are around people who are definitely living life to the fullest. Even their despair is gritty and real and fully committed, and I always feel like I'm living that line from the transfiguration scene in the Gospel: "How good it is for us to be here!"

—Barbara Nicolosi, "The Artist", in David Taylor ed., For the Beauty of the Church

We are obliged to the author of nature for having attached boredom to inaction, so as to force us to be useful to our neighbor and to ourselves.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

"But that means, if you'll follow my reasoning for a bit, that whenever I have a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it's staying there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up into his dreams. He talks to his wife about it. And he doesn't have any right to that information. If I was running a car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But that's what I do at five o'clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work."

—Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash