Emily Maxson

“We laugh at hamsters stuck on their metal play wheels. They give everything their little hamster bodies have but don’t go anywhere. That doesn’t matter, though, because they have little hamster brains. The hamster isn’t trying to finish anything. If anything he’s just trying to execute that elusive move where you get the wheel going so fast that you can do a full 360 around the circle. I bet the girl hamsters love that. You are smarter than a hamster. There’s a positive affirmation for you. Slap that on a mug.”
― Jon Acuff, Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

“Might as well” is never applied to good things. It’s never, “Might as well help all these orphans,” or “Might as well plant something healthy in this community garden.”
― Jon Acuff, Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

“I like to fix motorcycles more than I like to wire houses (even though I could make about twice as much money wiring houses).9 Both practices have internal goods that engage my attention, but fixing bikes is more meaningful because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence. People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“A regard for human excellence is the aristocratic ethos. To speak of aristocracy is perhaps a bit eccentric in our time, but consider the paradoxical truth that equality is an aristocratic ideal. It is the ideal of friendship—of those who stand apart from the collective and recognize one another as peers. As professionals, or fellow journeymen, perhaps. By contrast, the bourgeois principle is not equality but equivalence—a positing of interchangeability that elides human differences of rank.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work