Work Quotes

A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.

~ Anne Taylor Fleming

In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Work diligently. Work hard. Focus. Perform as if you are at the Olympics. One day, unexpectedly, it will start paying off.

~ Joan Marques

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.

~ Jerome K. Jerome

Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.

~ Anne Wilson Schaef

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

~ Hilaire Belloc

He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like core values at him with impunity.

~ Terry Pratchett

You did what you were told or you didn't get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn't your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn't your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care.

~ Terry Pratchett

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.(pg. 43, The Unsettling of America)

~ Wendell Berry

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Only super-efforts count.

~ G.i. Gurdjieff

Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he uselessly squanders, for the springs of energy in his organism, the gold of wisdom in the mines of his brains. The masses work, slog, forget. They drink the alcohol of their sweat. Work is a flight from responsibility and God. Since the mystic beliefs have been banned from Europe, pillars of glory have been erected to rationality in order to put something in place of the cross: the French Revolution named its goddess reason, the Russians named their Moloch work. But the machine called Europe is running idle: it fills stomachs with fake bread, builds artificial houses with iron paper, the products are bad, the pay meager, and at the end of the six holy work days is the unholy Sunday which one sleeps through out of fear of the great boredom which is infecting Europe. Sunday, the day of idleness, is nowadays a punishment for Christianity, the cities collapse into soulless ruins, nature is just a backdrop for dusty sports. Doing nothing out of principle, my dear, is nowadays the most violent form of revolt.

~ Iwan Goll

Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a 'cathedral' for worship of knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged.

~ Tony Attwood

My job is to scream cockle-doodle-doo. Don't blame me if the sun doesn't rise.

~ Janet Skeslien Charles

It [money] doesn't have anything have anything to do with the magnificence of a person. It doesn't. What matters is what you make. Whether it's a cake for bingo night or a costume for a saint or a wall of water--whatever you pour into this life is what makes you rich.

~ Adriana Trigiani

Everyone, no matter what kind of job he or she has, fantasizes about freaking out at work. How many corporate drones, stuck in a boring staff meeting, have had the sudden urge to jump on top of the conference table and start screaming obscenities? Strip off their clothes? Kiss the woman or man next to them? We all have. How many employees joke about shooting the boss or blowing the place up? I’m not suggesting we do any of these things, mind you, but let’s not kid ourselves; we all have a little murder in our heart.

~ Steve Dublanica

If you can work anywhere, anytime, then pretty soon you're working everywhere all the time.

~ Judy Nichols

I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.

~ Craig Ferguson

I now have anti-bodies to assholes after working for so many.

~ Crystal Woods

You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them.

~ L. Frank Baum

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.

~ Paul Hawken

Cat, I'll let you in on a little secret. We don't all love our jobs every day. And doing something you have passion for doesn't make the work part of it any easier...It just makes you less likely to quit.

~ Kate Jacobs

There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.

~ Alan Cohen

Learn to do common things uncommonly well, we must always keep in mind that anything that helps full the dinner pail is valuable.

~ George Washington Carver

Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him.

~ Benjamin Franklin

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.

~ George Lois

Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.

~ H.l. Mencken

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

~ George Santayana

Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair.

~ David Livingstone

The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.

~ Richard Bach

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

~ Raoul Vaneigem

Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him - why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also.

~ Mark Twain

But maybe it’s the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?

~ Chang-Rae Lee

Murderers don't get forgiven just because we promise to be good from now on. We have to earn our way back. One hundred is the price. One hundred lives for each we took. That seems fair. That's how we get whole again and that's our work, from now until as long as it takes.

~ Bill Willingham

Teach all men to fish, but first teach all men to be fair. Take less, give more. Give more of yourself, take less from the world. Nobody owes you anything, you owe the world everything.

~ Suzy Kassem

Some managers hire people they're excited to work with. I prefer to hire people I'm excited to dominate.

~ Mykle Hansen

One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America -- and at least double that number with a conscience. Hard as they try, they simply can't turn their heads away from an injustice when they see one taking place.

~ Michael Moore

A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.

~ Michael R. Legault

I had the most boring office job in the world...I used to clean the windows on envelopes.

~ Rita Rudner