Work Quotes

What is hard work? It takes strength, energy, and stress to truly care about others enough to place oneself last, but it is easy to wrap oneself up and selfishly scramble on the heads of others.

~ Criss Jami

You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is—I wouldn’t give twopence for him’— here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers— ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.

~ George Eliot

...treasure what it means to do a day's work. It's our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it's certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you'll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.

~ Seth Godin

For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs--jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.

~ Milton Friedman

I often think how unadventurous my life must seem from the outside, though I do like my job.

~ Mary Hoffman

Hard work should be rewarded by good food.

~ Ken Follett

The world, and therefore the workplace, is full of idiots. And the reality of life is that when you get rid of one idiot, another will show up to take his place. It's the curse of humanity.

~ Larry Winget

..The stuff you learn beforehand will never be one-tenth as useful as the stuff you learn the hard way, on the job.

~ Hugh Macleod

I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you.

~ Mary Karr

The only way to make a spoilt machine work again is to break it down, work on its inner system and fix it again. Screw out the bolts of your life, examine and work on yourself, fix your life again and get going.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Prayer will never do our work for us, what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.

~ William Barclay

The distinction between assistant and intern is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

There's nothing like active employment, I suppose, to console the afflicted.

~ Anne Brontë

The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation.

~ Helen Nearing

It is beyond a doubt that everyone should have time for some special delight, if only five minutes each day to seek out a lovely flower or cloud or star, or learn a verse to brighten another’s dull task. What is the use of such terrible diligence as many tire themselves out with, if they always postpone their exchanges of smiles with Beauty and Joy to cling to irksome duties and relations?

~ Helen Keller

Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.

~ John Derbyshire

Work like hell, tell everyone everything you know, close a deal with a handshake, and have fun.

~ Harold Eugene Edgerton

Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didn’t want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didn’t feel so good today.

~ Rollo Romig

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

~ Philip Larkin

In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

~ Karl Marx

I never realizedtill nowhow hard the brain has to workto make the body do what it asks.Or maybe how hard the body has to workto ignorethe brain.

~ Thalia Chaltas

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play

~ John Cleese

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

~ Douglas Coupland

I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen' 'You make it sound so simple.''It is simple,' he said. 'The thing is, it's also a lot of hard work. And people don't want to put in a lot of work.

~ Jojo Moyes

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.

~ Margaret Atwood

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

~ André Breton

Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside.

~ Christopher Moore

As long as you're in the food business, why not make sweets?

~ Anne Frank

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

~ Henry James

Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.

~ Joe Frazier

The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

~ Paul Graham

The best incentive for an artist are the harshest criticism

~ Válgame

Work is the greatest thing in the world. So we should save some of it for tomorrow.

~ Don Herold

Face it: as much as you’d like to be, you’re not perfect. Mistakes will be made in both your freelance career and life. Instead of fearing mistakes, remind yourself that there’s plenty to learn from them. If nothing else, you’ll learn that a mistake doesn’t mean the end of the world. In fact, it might be the beginning of a new one.

~ Michael Law

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

~ Susan Sontag

Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

~ Karl Marx

People LOVE change (when it's about changing others). People HATE change (when it's about changing themselves).

~ Richie Norton

Work is a blessing when it helps us to think about what we are doing, but it becomes a curse when its sole use is to stop us thinking about the meaning of life.

~ Paulo Coelho

So, let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look over not only ourselves, but each other.

~ Barack Obama

The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.

~ Phil Jackson