Work Quotes

The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.

~ Oliver Burkeman

I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic - to their often justifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person.

~ David Graeber

It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.

~ Richard Koch

The Protestant teachings caused people to view their work as a way of proving their love to God so they tried to do their best and give the best quality to God by giving the best quality to man.

~ Sunday Adelaja

A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.

~ P.m.s. Blackett

The Bibbidi Bobbidi Beautiful boutique, the name filled me with dread.

~ Jessica Fortunato

If you have no job, help is needed.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Every blessing is a challenge to work.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Pique or policy. We would never know.

~ Roger Kahn

He has little hope that university, when he gets there next year, will be any different. Like right now, all these pupils taking notes as if their life depended on it. All for what? he wants to shout. To get into the top university, so that you can somehow convince yourself you are better than the great unwashed? So that your parents can convince themselves that they are better parents than the great unwashed? So that Mum and Dad’s fourteen-hour days at the office, paying for a fucking private education you never asked for, wasn’t just a pathetic waste of a life?

~ Tabitha Suzuma

Work gives us access and opportunities.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Even hell will give you an incentive not to reach for heaven.

~ Garry Crystal

My mind was not that of a conqueror, but that of a cow that spends its life chewing contentedly in the meadow of invoices, waiting for the train of eternal grace to pass by. How good it felt to exist without pride of ambition. To live in hibernation.

~ Amélie Nothomb

Ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put

~ Lena Dunham

There comes a time in everyone’s life—and I do mean in everyone’s life—when you ask yourself what it is that you’ve been doing with your life. Sometimes you even realize that whatever you’ve been doing all your life, you’ve been doing it wrong. Dead wrong… Son, you want that realization to hit you when you’re 70? Or 50? Or when you’re still young, with your whole life still ahead of you?

~ Ali Sheikh

Why do I keep evading my work? Is it because I’m afraid of being confronted by my lack of abilities?

~ Candace Bushnell

Service for one another, service for mankind

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

These is nothing divine about deprecating your gifts and talents or diminishing their worth in any way. Shining is sharing an abundance with us all.

~ Tama Kieves

DIGNITY OF LABOR indicates that all types of jobs are respected equally, and no occupation is considered superior. Though one’s occupation for his or her livelihood involves physical work or menial labour, it is held that the job carries dignity, compared to the jobs that involve more intellect than body.

~ Dignity

...Working for peace is never a one man battle. It means when one person who does not want to work for it is present among others, he/she becomes another work for the passionate people to work on upon and this makes the entire work more difficult!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Curiosity was a bad character trait for a private investigator to have. It created work.

~ Dee Henderson

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

~ Kevin James Breaux

Work for purpose, be for others.

~ Worknb

Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won.

~ Sara Sheridan

Look at it this way—before any of this wood became parts of the shelves or the desk or the chair, all of it was in pieces—just pieces of wood. But the wood was full of potential. It could be shaped into anything that a carpenter wanted it to be shaped into, turning it into a beautiful finished product. Now, not all carpenters are equal in skill—you know that. If a piece of wood is shaped by a poor carpenter, the finished product will be lacking somehow, in some way.But if that wood is shaped by a master carpenter, then that piece will fit into this world precisely as it’s supposed to fit, whether it be a desktop or a cabinet shelf or a doorstop. And the way that I work wood is the way I try to work with people—with love and attention and caring—so that the wood and the people can reach their potential. And if someone lets you teach them, and is open to what you have to teach, then how can you go wrong?

~ Tom Walsh

Fight, fight, fight and get that money, money, money. ’Cause happiness can’t buy even a nickel.

~ Ari Gold

When you've earned something, I mean really earned it, no one can make you doubt that you deserve it. They can't say it isn't yours. There's something about getting a thing that you've bled and fought for that makes the getting that much sweeter.

~ Rachael Allen

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.

~ Paul Valéry

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you seem to be naturally motivated to continue.

~ Brian Tracy

Stop sleeping, Get to work! You will have much time to sleep when you die.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

You can walk into your room after walking out through the door, but you cannot come out of your grave after being buried into the soil.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The grandeur of a profession is...above all, uniting men: there is only one true luxury, that of human relationships.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A huge mistake that many of us make is to work hard our entire life for money and not require money to work for us in return.

~ Daniel Willey

Every single aspect of what we do at work comes down to people and managing people, selling to people, working with people or making them do what you want them to do.

~ Abhishek Ratna

Someday, I suppose I’ll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I’ll probably be rocking fast, because I don’t know what I’ll do without a job.

~ Pat Summitt

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one for helping yourself and one for helping others

~ Audrey Hepburn

Once again discovered: Do what you do because you enjoy. If expect others to give credit or honor your work, you are due for disappointment

~ Phillip Gary Smith

Most USA citizens never realize that the systems of public protection are essentially useless until they try to use them. At that point they learn the hard way that government agencies like OSHA, FCC, FDA, police internal affairs, disability, and the like do not work for them.

~ Steven Magee

Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time.

~ Shawn Achor

I must go on living. And, though itmay be childish of me, I can't go on insimple compliance. From now on I muststruggle with the world. I thought thatMother might well be the last of thosewho can end their lives beautifully andsadly, struggling with no one, neitherhating nor betraying anyone. In theworld to come there will be no room forsuch people. The dying are beautiful,but to live, to survive – those thingssomehow seem hideous andcontaminated with blood.

~ Osamu Dazai