Work Quotes

There should be no separation between spontaneous work with an emotional tone and work directed by the intellect. Both are supplementary to each other and must be regarded as intimately connected. Discipline and freedom are thus to be seen as elements of equal weight, each partaking of the other.

~ Armin Hofmann

We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsible within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone. (pg. 134, The Body and the Earth)

~ Wendell Berry

If the least thing goes wrong with a saddle, or clothes, or a boot, you cannot find a soul to make repairs, and the other day a cobbler answered us, 'Yes, that's right, I'm a shoemaker, and sometimes I work, but I'm not in the mood right now.

~ Louis-Philippe

(Sadie)I'm not judging you, Dylan. I love vampire movies. If I looked surprised it was only because it's so different from your TV work, that's all.His shoulders relaxed a notch. Sorry. Olly gives me a lot of shit for selling out. He doesn't get that no one is ever going to make his movie about two old men on a fishing trip. Or, even if they do, no one is every going to go see it.

~ Sarah Mayberry

When we start being too impressed by the results of our work, we slowly come to the erroneous conviction that life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing the points to measure our worth. And before we are fully aware of it, we have sold our soul to the many grade-givers. That means we are not only in the world, but also of the world. Then we become what the world makes us. We are intelligent because someone gives us a high grade. We are helpful because someone says thanks. We are likable because someone likes us. And we are important because someone considers us indispensable. In short, we are worthwhile because we have successes. And the more we allow our accomplishments — the results of our actions — to become the criteria of our self-esteem, the more we are going to walk on our mental and spiritual toes, never sure if we will be able to live up to the expectations which we created by our last successes. In many people’s lives, there is a nearly diabolic chain in which their anxieties grow according to their successes. This dark power has driven many of the greatest artists into self-destruction.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.

~ Anton Chekhov

Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish.

~ E.m. Bounds

To do the work of others is slavery. To do the work of God is true liberation.

~ Anonymous

Sibyl, what do you want?”“I want to live,” the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. “I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Bodily agitation, then, is an enemy to the spirit. And by agitation I do not necessarily mean exercise or movement. There is all the difference in the world between agitation and work.Work occupies the body and the mind and is necessary for the health of the spirit. Work can help us to pray and be recollected if we work properly. Agitation, however, destroys the spiritual usefulness of work and even tends to frustrate its physical and social purpose. Agitation is the useless and ill-directed action of the body. It expresses the inner confusion of a soul without peace. Work brings peace to the soul that has a semblance of order and spiritual understanding. It helps the soul to focus upon its spiritual aims and to achieve them. But the whole reason for agitation is to hide the soul from itself, to camouflage its interior conflicts and their purposelessness, and to induce a false feeling that 'we are getting somewhere'.

~ Thomas Merton

In science, work (W) is done when force (F) move a body through a distance (D). It is the same with our every day affairs. When you don't progress, no work is done irrespective of the force (power) you have

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.

~ Greg Iles

Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know.

~ Flannery O'connor

Don’t work too hard. Try to maintain balance. Don’t make work your whole life.

~ Bronnie Ware

It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Saturday off and coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller, if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing or- anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!

~ Margaret Widdemer

Billionaires’ working hours are twenty-four seven. They don’t wait till Monday.

~ Sophie Page

I did not myself set a high estimation on wealth, and had the affectation of most young men of lively imagination, who suppose that they can better dispense with the possession of money, than resign their time and faculties to the labour necessary to acquire it.

~ Walter Scott

Work is tough for everyone but for Kyle Shannon, it's just murder.

~ Linda Mickey

You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.

~ Neil Gaiman

If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.

~ Darryl F. Zanuck

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

~ Alain De Botton

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families--only to find that by then their families were gone.

~ Larissa Macfarquhar

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.

~ Samuel Butler

I feel like every project I work on is a dream project, so long as I am learning.

~ Simeon Kondev

Sometimes it’s hard to know when you’ve crossed the line from conscientious to compulsive. When you’re in the thick of an assignment, it’s easy to believe that you must spend so much time brainstorming, researching, writing, testing, revising or what-have-you. Often, it’s only after you’ve been working for hours on end that you realize that half the work you’ve been doing wasn’t actually necessary and that you’ve just wasted a lot of time.

~ Michael Law

You know, I know I should be just as panicky as you about the filthy work - one wants to do nothing in the evenings, certainly not spread rotten books around & dredge for a 'line'. It must be like still being a student, with an essay to do after a week's drinking, only you haven't had the drinking. Quite clearly, to me, you aren't a voluntary worker, from the will: you do it by intuitive flashes, more like an act of creation, & when the flashes don't come, as of course they don't, especially when the excess energy of undergraduate days is gone, then it is a hideous unnatural effort.

~ Philip Larkin

If you agree to work for us, half the time you won't know the purpose of your duties . . . and when we do explain, we might not be telling the truth. But that's the real world, folks . . .

~ James Alan Gardner

In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love.But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves.In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning.

~ Marjorie Spock

[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.

~ Tahir Shah

Touch paper only once.

~ Robert Allen

Prayer not only teaches and strengthens one for work, work teaches and strengthens one for prayer.

~ Andrew Murray

Winslow bounced over on the balls of his feet, clearly not experiencing any sort of crash. 'Aren't your guys nervous? I'm nervous as all hell.''There's nothing to be nervous about,' Beck said, joining them. 'Nerves are only useful when they can spur you on to work harder, faster, better. Once the work is done, they become pointless.

~ Louisa Edwards

Travel wasn't fun if you didn't get to see or do what you wanted; it was merely a different type of work, in a different place.

~ Chris Pavone

Being by his faith replaced afresh in paradise and created anew, he (the believer)does not need works for his justification, but that he may not be idle, but that he may exercise his own body and preserve it. His works are to be done freely, with the sole object of pleasing God.

~ Martin Luther

We must primarily become seekers of God instead of founders of works, for work will not sustain us through the traumas of incarnation.

~ Viv Grigg

Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.

~ Jack London

Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn’t believe we were getting paid for this.

~ Joshua Ferris

The main character, Gene Moore, is shown how much of his identity is wrapped up in his career and potential in that career. When he comes home from war no longer able to see himself as a baseball prospect, he isn't sure who he is. This is thoroughly reinforced every time one of his acquaintances identifies him by baseball or inquires about his status. How much of our identity and worth is wrapped up in our job title or the one we are aspiring to?

~ Gary Moore