34 Quotes by Matthew B. Crawford

Joy is the feeling of one's powers increasing.

When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: "All human beings by nature desire to know.

We get alienated from ourselves when the product of our work is appropriated since that product is a concrete manifestation of one's own most human possibilities. 

Out of the current confusion of ideals and and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity.

Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces. We worry that we are becoming stupider, an begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.

The narrow mechanical things I concern myself with are inscribed within a larger circle of meaning; they are in service of an activity that we recognize as part of a life well lived. This common recognition, which needn't be spoken, is the basis for a friendship that orients by concrete images of excellence.

Let me make myself useful.

Things constitute commanding reality, devices procure disposable reality.

Anaxagoras wrote, “It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals.