A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.
The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.
Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of both.
A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't when he does feel like it.
He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.
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.
He measured all his fellow workers by the test of professionalism, and a professional is a man who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
But who does not see that the work goes beyond the one who created it? It marches before him and he will never again be able to catch up with it, it soon leaves his orbit, it will soon belong to another, since he, more quickly than his work, changes and becomes deformed, since before his work dies, he dies.
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.