Work Quotes

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

~ Bill Watterson

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be;In “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat,” his first speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons May 13, 1940 quoted by Jeffrey R. Holland in “However Long and Hard the Road” BYU Devotional 18 Jan 1983

~ Winston S. Churchill

That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.

~ Charles Bukowski

I like to reinvent myself — it’s part of my job.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.

~ Martin Luther

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

~ Malcolm Gladwell

Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade.

~ Rudyard Kipling

What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

~ Adam Smith

Now,young lady,I suppose you're here for a work assignment.Work? Tally said.They both looked down at her puzzled expression, and Shay burst into laughter.

~ Scott Westerfeld

In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find and continue to find grounds for marriage.

~ Robert Anderson

You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself - without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat.

~ Anonymous

If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.

~ Simon Sinek

No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.

~ Edward Gorey

We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

~ Ayn Rand

I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.

~ John Kennedy Toole

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.

~ Newt Gingrich

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

~ Wendell Berry

Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: Love. They must do it for love. Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.

~ Wendell Berry

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

~ Mark Twain

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

~ Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Its hard to stay up. Its been a long long dayAnd you've got the sandman at your door. But hang on, leave the TV on and lets do it anyway.Its ok. You can always sleep through work tomorrow. Ok?Hey, Hey, Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.Tell the clock on the wall, Forget the wake up call.Cause the night's not nearly through.Wipe the sleep from your eyes. Give yourself a surprise.Let your worries wait another day.And if you stay too late at the bar,At least you made it out this far. So make up your mind and say, Let's do it anyway!Its OkYou can always sleep through work tomorrow, ok? Hey, Hey, Tomorrow's just your future yesterday. Life's too short to worry about the things that you can live withoutAnd I regret to say, the morning light is hours away.The world can be such a fright, But it belongs to us tonight.What's the point of going to bed?You look so lovely when your eyes are red.Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.

~ Craig Ferguson

Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.

~ Curtis Sittenfeld

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.

~ Steve Jobs

When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.

~ Thomas Merton

It is quality rather than quantity that matters.

~ Seneca

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

~ Gustave Flaubert

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

~ Eric Hoffer

I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.

~ Sigmund Freud

Whatever you make, base it upon that which is most important to you. Only then will it have depth and meaning, and only then will it resonate with others.

~ Christopher Paolini

Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.

~ Honoré De Balzac

What I've learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you're giving them what they want. They'll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you're going your job well, but the minute you're not, you're fucked. They'll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.

~ Russell Brand

It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.

~ Flannery O'connor

Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job, it takes a wise man to make it without working.

~ Charles Bukowski

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

~ Alasdair Gray

So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed.The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

~ Douglas Adams

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.

~ Carl Sandburg

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present - I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?

~ Marcus Aurelius