Work Quotes

The Fairy Queen has sent you to do brave deeds in this world. That High City that you see is in another world. Before you climb the path to it and hang your shield on its wall, go down into the valley and fight the dragon that you were sent to fight.

~ Margaret Hodges

All the so-called “secrets of success” will not work unless you do.

~ Anonymous

Always work with/surround yourself with people who help make you a better version of you. Kindly avoid those who don't.

~ Don Roff

No time for happiness, no time for sorrow. Work is the best of physicians.

~ Buddhadeva Bose

If want to succeed, you must work to overcome the obstacles on your path.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

For the achiever the battle with critics is a slow war of attrition. Let time do the dirty work for you.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.

~ Bette Davis

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

~ Alice Neel

Mediocrity is Death.

~ Suleman Abdullah

You think of killing himon the spotbut discard that thought andleave,down into the urine-stinkingelevator, they have you crucified too, America at work, where they rip out your intestinesand your brain and your will and your spirit. They suck you dry, then throw you away. The capitalist system. The work ethic. The profit motive. The memory of your father’s words,“work hard and you’ll be appreciated.” of course, only if you make much more for them than they payyou.

~ Charles Bukowski

The only thing free about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is an euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.

~ Bob Black

Marx made theory... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.

~ Diego Rivera

These diverse effects of slavery and freedom are easily understood: … the men in Kentucky [neither] have zeal nor enlightenment … cross over into Ohio in order to utilize their industry and to be able to exercise it without shame … in Kentucky, masters make slaves work without being obliged to pay them, but they receive little fruit from their efforts, while the money that they would give to free workers would be recovered with interest from the value of their labors.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.

~ James C. Scott

It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoise. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lack for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoise rarely, if ever, speaks for itself.

~ James C. Scott

Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.

~ Paul Lafargue

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!

~ Paul Lafargue

What could be better for slave owners than slaves who think they’re free? This is the greatest trick ever pulled: a nation of slaves who think they’re free. Slaves must be fed, housed, even clothed. But if they must feed, house, and clothe themselves as ‘payment’ for their work, this removes burden from the slave owner—while the same work is performed and accomplished, to the benefit of the slave owner. The best part is that slaves who think they’re free will never work to end their slavery. They will look down on those who do not work. To work to end their slavery, they must first learn they are slaves. This is the hardest task of all: to free their minds.

~ Robert Peate

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing — or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

~ Bob Black

You're only as good as your next idea. And if you can't agree on that, then it's time to walk.

~ John Hegarty

Mr. Lilly, on the other hand, is not selling me a product I can use. He is selling a fancy new thing called a methodology. You know what a methodology is? It's a painted box filled with nothing except my own desires for a more profitable company. He is looking to take a percentage of the transaction between me and my own soul without creating any value. This is a very old trick that's been going on since religion began. It is without ethics and it distinguishes me from Mr. Lilly.

~ Charlie Close

Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.

~ Aristotle

The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes only when he is not at work.

~ Eric Gill

Tasks don't have to be high-impact to be worthy of high effort. Most things we do in any given day are relatively low impact. The cumulative impact of thousands of low-impact test is huge. These tasks can be transposed into worship.

~ John Piper

Every morning do not go to work, but go to actualize your desire filled dreams.

~ Debasish Mridha

Work and play is the same thing just with a different perspective.

~ Debasish Mridha

When you love your work then it isn't work, it's your love affair.

~ Debasish Mridha

They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master—I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov—my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood.

~ Maxim Gorky

Love what you do!

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Work while you can. But avoid overwork, depletion of energy.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

So, a word to all you Femin-Idi-Amins: Stop “liberating” moms by trying tomake them join the workforce. They’re already doing the job that God putthem here to do: Everything.

~ Stephen Colbert

I have learned that as soon as you introduce controls on human behavior, you lose the game, particularly when those controls are at odds with the work.

~ John Seddon

Because our attachment to control is either unexamined or addictive, we do not understand that by relinquishing control and providing choice, we increase our influence and impact many times over.

~ Roger Harrison

If you work your hardest and you do your best, then the rest is not in your control, but in God's Hands.

~ Christopher Morris

If you work your hardest, and you do your best, then the rest is not in your control, but in God's Hands.

~ Chrostoph Morris

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

~ Richard Marius

School means work and work means death. Let's all go take a nap.

~ Emma Shannon

Christianity is just simple. Preach as if Jesus Christ is on the first seat listening to you. Work as if Jesus Christ is your immediate supervisor. Give as if you are giving to Christ. Eat and drink as if you are dining with Christ. Walk as if you are taking a stroll with Christ. Dance as if you are dancing with Christ. Think as if Christ is marking your thought. Dress as if you have a meeting with Christ. Clear your heart as if it is the only guest room available for your special guest, Christ. Speak as if you are speaking to Christ. Watch as if you are looking at Christ. Listen as if you have borrowed the ears of Christ. Respect time as if you borrowed from Christ. All else matters less and no problem then exists. Living to gratify mankind and ourselves is a mere hypocrisy in the first order and the underpinning of the woes of mankind.

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.

~ Alain De Botton

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

~ Peter F. Drucker