Quotes About Making Things Work

#1. As a doctor, an educator, an innovator and someone who has dedicated his professional career to making things work better and to helping people - I am ready to lead.

Donald Berwick

#2. My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student.

Alvin E. Roth

#3. Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things "work," but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either.

Richard Rohr

#4. Making things . . . And making things work . . . That's where satisfaction is in this life.

Paul Chadwick

#5. Design isn't just about making things beautiful; it's also about making things work beautifully.

Roger Martin

#6. You got to keep all your weaknesses away, and my weakness is women. I love women too much. Which has definitely road-blocked me. I just try my best to channel my energy to other things and remain focused while making my work as fun as everything else.

Bow Wow

#7. I work with a lot of music programs and there's a steep learning curve to a lot of them. You can really find yourself trying to figure out how to do things, instead of making music. Now I have another tool with the Surface music kit.

Joe

#8. I'm just trying to make my favorite music. That's how I work; I just do things based on the way they feel to me. I want to be touched by the music I'm making. Luckily, other people have shared that response to my work over the years.

Rick Rubin

#9. I don't mind making a fool of myself. I felt like people would be accepting of that because, to me, that seems like an interesting way to do a show. I've always thought that it's interesting to watch people work things out on stage.

Fiona Apple

#10. I wanted to move away from Holland for my work because I felt that things would be better for me in England. But when I heard Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures', that pushed me towards making the move and making it real. I met them within 12 days of moving to England.

Anton Corbijn

#11. As a rule, I am lazy and prefer to avoid anything resembling work, and research feels like work, as opposed to my strong suit, which is sitting around making things up.

Arthur Phillips

#12. Gary Ross is amazing. He's just - he always has a billion ideas of what he wants, but has a very clear perspective also; he just makes it work. He really does. He's trying different things and making everything look amazing.

Liam Hemsworth

#13. As we strive to understand issues in their social, political and economic contexts, we are better able to move away from individualizing problems and making them about someone's character flaw. We also become less likely to pathologize women and more likely to understand how and why things work.

Brene Brown

#14. Writing and making films aren't different things to me. Or maybe it has become so, now. Making film is a very long process and you have to be physically strong. The literary work is more mystical, because it's only the writer, and connected to something inside.

Abdellah Taia

#15. Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.

Thomas Carlyle

#16. Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.

Harold E. Varmus

#17. You know, I like playing music and playing guitar, and I like to draw, so I thought I would end up just probably barely making a living, or probably having to have some other job, but being involved in one of those things that I really like to do. But that didn't work out like that.

John Corbett

#18. The problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.

Cory Doctorow

#19. The reason people come to work for GE, they want to be apart of something bigger than themselves, they want to work for a company that makes a difference, a company that is doing great things in the world.

Jeffrey R. Immelt

#20. We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.

Atul Gawande

#21. Making a home is hard work, and for some reason it's underappreciated. It's way to make sense of things.

Erin Boyle

#22. I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

Michael Haneke

#23. I always thought that I was lazy because I could never tell if I was working or not. I was making things, which doesn't seem like work.

Ari Marcopoulos

#24. A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?

Rene Daumal

#25. The first thing I tell clients is get off the couch! Just start making some small lifestyle changes such as walking to work instead of driving or taking the stairs instead of the lift. The small things you can change all add up.

Jessie Pavelka

#26. SCIENCE: a way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong.

Terry Pratchett

#27. Confidence comes from hard work. It comes from facing different situations and making putts. It comes from knowing you've worked on the right things, so when you get under the gun, you can execute what you've practiced.

David Duval

#28. Many people are starting to realize that they work a lot and that working on stuff they believe in (and making things happen) is much more satisfying then just getting a paycheck and waiting to get fired (or die).

Seth Godin

#29. We must pay greater attention to keeping our bodies and minds healthy and able to heal. Yet we are making it difficult for our defences to work. We allow things to be sold that should not be called food. Many have no nutritive value and lead to obesity, salt imbalance, and allergies.

David Suzuki

#30. The Holy Trinity doesn't need our permission to carry on in their endlessly resourceful work of making all things new. That we are invited to catch even a glimpse of the splendor is grace. All of it, every breath and every second is grace.

Rachel Held Evans

#31. That's one of the main things I do, work with choreographers. I've been doing it a long time, and it's a real important part of my life as a soundmaker, making music for dance.

Zeena Parkins

#32. I love making people sing. I love group singing, sacred harp singing, choral singing, recordings of people singing sea shanties, work songs, prison songs - how people just sang to get through things.

Matana Roberts

#33. It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

Larry Page

#34. If people are coming to work excited ... if they're making mistakes freely and fearlessly ... if they're having fun ... if they're concentrating on doing things rather than preparing reports and going to meetings-then somewhere you have leaders.

Robert Townsend

#35. You have to be flexible enough to realize that, over the course of making a film for three and a half years, things are going to slightly change and drift, as you work out solutions to each problem as they come up.

Duncan Jones

#36. You work on things and you have such faith in them while you're making them that everything feels special - in a way.

Guy Pearce

#37. The paradox of simplicity is that making things simpler is hard work.

Bill Jensen

#38. I was very focused, driven, rigid, work-oriented. I didn't care about having a family or making a home. I didn't think about kids. It's not that I didn't want those things; I just didn't think about them.

Susan Downey

#39. As a director, your job is to make sure no one for any reason is taken out of the film. Sometimes it's impossible and sometimes things don't come out the way you want them to, but I think you have to work really hard at making the world engrossing and details are a major part of that.

Cary Fukunaga

#40. When you work for somebody who is very technical, and understands and has creative solutions to your problems, it spurs you along and stops you making excuses for things. And I found that very useful.

David Perry

#41. One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.

John Green

#42. When you get into a production, there are a lot of things you have to hit to make the show work - like my cues or a cue for another person or making sure you don't mess up the beat, and you can let all of that get in the way.

Matthew James Thomas

#43. A lot of people think that my work is about mocking or making fun of things, but a lot of it is about discomfort and making myself as uncomfortable as the men feel, or putting myself in a situation where I'm revealing my loneliness as much as they're revealing theirs.

Laurel Nakadate

#44. Fruit falls when you shake the tree. You have to keep making things happen.

Brandi L. Bates

#45. In the old days, when you took out a mortgage, it was probably through a local bank or a credit union, and whoever gave you your loan held on to it for life. If you lost your job or got too sick to work and suddenly had trouble making your payments, you could call a human being and work things out.

Matt Taibbi

#46. I have this fantasy of my older days, painting or sculpting or making things. I have this fantasy of a bike trip to Chile. I have this fantasy of flying into Morocco. But right now, it's about getting the work done and getting home to family. I have an adventure every morning, getting up.

Brad Pitt

#47. Reaking up the space and using the space, using the length of the space, the height of it, whatever, the light, all of those things. It's something that you have to kind of slowly recognize in your work and develop over years of making work.

Robert Barry

#48. Every director is different. One of the great things about getting to work with so many directors in one TV series is collaborating with different artistic visions and voices. And they all have something to offer and making the story better and bringing their vision to what you see in the frame.

Beau Willimon

#49. I love ensemble work. I love making pieces and building things together.

Uzo Aduba

#50. I can't think of a better rationale to create a work of art. I don't care what form one's art takes, it has to be an attempt to leave the world a better place than it was before we got here or it's not doing its job. And I don't mean just making things that are pretty.

Charles De Lint

#51. If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started "being creative," well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

Austin Kleon

#52. I believe that music is about making quality things, making quality art, and no matter who you decide to work with, you and that person have to come up with something special, come up with something that is excellent material, so whoever hears it and reviews it will like it.

Common

#53. Whether it's digital or physical, a pencil or a pen: line work. Humans are making things. And out of that comes the entire designed world we live within.

Jake Barton

#54. Sometimes you see things in a script, and it doesn't necessarily mean the director sees the same things. And if you think you're going to be making a different film, then that's not gonna work.

Michael Sheen

#55. Making a difference in your work is not about productivity; it's about people. When you focus on others and connect with them, you can work together to accomplish great things.

John C. Maxwell

#56. With all the decision making in my life, I often have to pause, look up and remember God is the One working behind the scenes. I say to myself, He is able to work all things out for good. I just need to submit to Him and His ways. I can rest.

K.P. Yohannan

#57. Design and style should work toward making you look good and feel good without a lot of effort so you can get on with the things that matter.

Donna Karan

#58. We work only with things that don't exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, units of time, units of space - how is explanation even possible if we begin by making everything into an image, our image! It

Friedrich Nietzsche

#59. I wonder a lot about making things meaningful. You want to do meaningful work and make art, but you're making records, which is good, but you don't want to weight them - it's a very curious thing.

Doseone

#60. There are a lot of things going on with my life right now that don't just have to do with career. So I have a hard time making decisions about work. That's really a luxury problem.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#61. I like making movies. I like the process. I like trying out new ideas, and if they don't work, they don't work. That's the reason I generated the money in the first place, to be able to try things. That's where I spend my money.

George Lucas

#62. Obsession and repetition in the process of making things is one constant element in my work.

Sandy Skoglund

#63. The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for. A lot of people seem to think there is some sort of magic in making a winning football team. There isn't, but there's plenty of work.

Knute Rockne

#64. So, one, that DJ Spooky is a lot you know this sort of wilder persona and then Paul Miller is more of a nuts and bolts kind of person, meaning just making sure all these things work.

DJ Spooky

#65. There's a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are "making a living". No, they're not. They're dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

Adrian Tan

#66. Bard eyed him like he was manure on her shoes at the same time she did things, like sharpen a wooden stake, something she knew didn't work on him, but that was not her point, even if she was making one.

Kristen Ashley

#67. I love the fact that I work with everything that has to do with the brand, the product, the environment, the online, the architecture, the web design, because I am somebody that loves making things, making experiences, creating things that people love to engage with.

Christopher Bailey

#68. Sometimes you could be in an unhappy relationship; you are very much in love with someone, but it's making you unhappy and you think things can change and you can work it out.

Vanessa Paradis

#69. Some scripts you read and say, 'I've just got to do this' and you find a way of making it work. Some things you turn down because of the impact on family.

Miranda Otto

#70. Complaining will not change things in your life; only action will. Make a list of all you need to do to change what doesn't work in your life and, little by little, begin making those changes.

Susan Jeffers

#71. I really wanted to go to a city and get involved in a theater scene and a theater community. I had some friends who had moved out to Chicago and had said really good things about it and about the work. I didn't care at that time about making money.

Timothy Simons

#72. Do not settle for easy. Do not settle for that first image. Craft it, work it, and make something more out of it. And finally, don't forget that the biggest joy in photography is making pictures of those things in your own life.

David Burnett

#73. While I have devised various formal strategies for articulating [my] concerns, I think fundamentally the work is driven by a basic curiosity. I seek to find out things about people by making photographs of them.

Dawoud Bey

#74. I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to set up, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists, and that sequence of calls propels me forward.

Richard Branson

#75. The hardest part of art-making is living your life in such a way that your work gets done-over and over-and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.

David Bayles

#76. I spent a lot of time making music and touring around the country and living the weird life. I was just trying to keep a job and get by. So in a lot of ways, I went through a strange version of film school. So you live through a lot of things, and put them into your work.

Dito Montiel

#77. You have to have good training partners and not people who crank on things. There's a difference between cranking on it and catching it, holding it and making the guy work out. You have to be selective with your training partners for sure.

Jon Fitch

#78. It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles - physical, intellectual, spiritual - that I can attain a state of flow when making something that I almost never can when writing.

David Rakoff