Marshall McLuhan Quotes

We don't consider manual work as a curse, or a bitter necessity, not even as a means of making a living. We consider it as a high human function, as the basis of human life, the most dignified thing in the life of the human being, and which ought to be free, creative. Men ought to be proud of it.

My first experience with the creative was mopping tar. If you let the tar sit, it can get cold pretty quickly. And because the mops are so heavy, you've got to dip it and then ride it really fast.

When I was in Chicago, I was working as a carpenter while I was doing plays. I thought it'd be a fun set construction job, but it turned up to just be a straight-up factory.

I was one who liked to work with my hands as well as my brain.

I had to work on a Marlin boat, like gutting fish, like as the bait boy.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

To be an artist is first to be a manual laborer.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles.

Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk

When you fix something with your hands it gives you a sense of accomplishment and a sense of self worth.

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

Who remove stones, bruise their fingers.

Working with people on a field turns me on.

The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile.

I think with my hands, it was catching a lot of footballs and working with my father during the summer because he would always make me. My father was a bricklayer so I was a helper. My job was to make sure that he had bricks to lay.

Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

A poet is a painter of the soul.

No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet.

The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers?

In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.

For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker.

You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.