Work Quotes

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.

~ John Muir

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Go on with your work as usual, for work is a blessed solace.

~ Louisa May Alcott

Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. (pg.132, The Body and the Earth)

~ Wendell Berry

The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that to work is to pray. (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)

~ Wendell Berry

I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

~ Henry James

The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

~ G.k. Chesterton

A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito Almanza declares: ‘I am convinced that all of photography depends on the moment we press the release […] I believe that you’re a photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.’ In making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: ‘[…] sometimes I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn’t begin in the dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger.

~ Clive Scott

Do what you want that works.

~ Toba Beta

To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,To lie flat and know nothing and be still,Are the two trades of man; and which is worseI know not, but I know that both are ill.

~ A.e. Housman

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

~ Núria Añó

Lucian's father had warned him to fear idle men. Without the pride gained from a good day's work, they were left to their vices and the doubts that crowded their head. Their hatred. Their envy.

~ Melina Marchetta

If you expect great things of yourself and demand little of others, you’ll keep resentment far away.

~ Confucius

If you want an incredibly passionate, happy, ALIVE business…don’t overcomplicate things. Once all is said and done, the foundational elements of a successful business are very simple: respect, service, value and sales. Comparatively, everything else is froth.

~ Richie Norton

The employed are punished by having to do what they do not love. The self-employed are punished by the opposite.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

There are plenty of people dragging themselves miserably through the world, because they are clogged and fettered with work for which they have no fitness... I can't help believing that nothing is better than to find one's work early and hold fast to it, and put all one's heart into it.

~ Sarah Orne Jewett

I once met a woman who'd been in therapy... and it seemed like the big thing she'd learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. That's when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. There's a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if you've got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time you've finished it the day has begun ands you're onto the next thing. You're over the hump, like I said.

~ Michael Marshall Smith

I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good........An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

~ Alain De Botton

The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.

~ Joel Salatin

Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality, when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.

~ Charles Dickens

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.

~ Jeannette Walls

And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ.

~ Anonymous

Then a ploughman said , speak to us of work : in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life ,And to love life throught labour is to be intimate with inmost secrets .And what is it to work with love ?it is to weave the colth with threads from your heart , even as if your beloved were to wear that colth .It is to build a house with affection , even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house .It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy , even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit .It is to change all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit .He who works in marble , and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone , is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.

~ Kahlil Gibran

When did life start being something you had to work at and not something that just is?

~ Brian James

I often think about dogs when I think about work and retirement. There are many breeds of dog that just need to be working, and useful, or have a job of some kind, in order to be happy. Otherwise they are neurotically barking, scratching, or tearing up the sofa. A working dog needs to work. And I am a working dog.

~ Martha Sherrill

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited--long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms--what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling.

~ Alain De Botton

Imagine that you are stuck on a long train ride and must choose one of two books to read in order to pass the time: the first is a novel whose main character is an office worker who is essentially working to pay his monthly cable bill; the second is about someone who decides to travel in South America (and of course encounters various setbacks in the process), but who pushes beyond the boundaries of conventional American life. Which... book would you pick up to read? Indeed, which of the two characters would you rather be?

~ Mark Thompson

There was a sergeant at a desk. I knew he was a sergeant because I recognized the marks on his uniform, and I knew it was a desk because it's always a desk. There's always someone at a desk, except when it's a table that functions as a desk. You sit behind a desk, and everyone knows you're supposed to be there, and that you're doing something that involves your brain. It's an odd, special kind of importance. I think everyone should get a desk; you can sit behind it when you feel like you don't matter.

~ Steven Brust

Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.

~ Howard Schultz

All my life I've been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard.

~ Glenn T. Seaborg

Wasted strokes, like missed deadlines, are preventable and costly.

~ Lorii Myers

If you don't interfere with me, I'll always do something really good.

~ John Malkovich

Because I'm a man who works, who knows what a human being is like inside, who knows that every human being has his worth, and who wants the world to be governed by work and not by opinions about work.

~ Wilhelm Reich

Work will drive you crazy if you let it.

~ Patrick Dewitt

Why do I have to do the sewin'? 'Cause I'm a girl? Is that it? It ain't fair, I tell ya!

~ Seán Cullen

The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother and her child.

~ Joan C. Williams

Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.

~ Josef Pieper