Quotes about work

Poor workers! First they're cuckolded, and, as if that weren't enough, then they're beaten! Work's a curse, Saturno. I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation --that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno --I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it!

— Luis Bunuel

Beauty is also to be found in a day's work.

— Mamie Sypert Burns

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

— Samuel Butler

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

— Samuel Butler

Most people show up for work being physically accoutered but mentally disheveled.

— Eric Butterworth

The secret of making something work in your lives is, first of all, the deep desire to make it work: then the faith and belief that it can work: then to hold that clear definite vision in your consciousness and see it working out step by step, without one thought of doubt or disbelief.

— Eileen Caddy

It is an article of faith in my creed to pick the man who does not take himself seriously, but does take his work seriously.

— Michael C. Cahill

Work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great images in whose presence [His Or Her] heart first opened.

— Albert Camus

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

— Thomas Carlyle

Every noble work is at first impossible.

— Thomas Carlyle

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.

— Thomas Carlyle

Work alone is noble.

— Thomas Carlyle

The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.

— Andrew Carnegie

Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.

— Dale Carnegie

Cessation of work is not accompanied by cessation of expenses.

— Cato The Elder

Every man is the son of his own works.

— Miguel De Cervantes

The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his own works.

— Miguel De Cervantes

I believe that good things come to those who work.

— Wilt Chamberlain

Never hire anyone who is going to report directly to you who you do not intuitively just plain like from first impressions. If your instincts tell you you're going to have a hard time working with someone, pass.

— Fred Charette

Nowhere so busy a man as he than he, and yet he seemed busier than he was.

— Geoffrey Chaucer

The more one works, the more willing one is to work.

— Lord Chesterfield

Feeding the hungry is a greater work than raising the dead.

— St. John Chrysosatom

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.

— John Cleese

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity. In what we call art, it's one of the most desirable characteristics of a piece of work.

— Leonard Cohen

Chose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

— Confucius

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

— Joseph Conrad

When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.

— Calvin Coolidge

Work is more fun than fun.

— Noel Coward

It is better to wear out than to rust out.

— Richard Cumberland

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.

— Clarence Darrow

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

To fulfill a dream to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.

— Bette Davis

Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.

— Eugene Delacroix

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

— Peter F. Drucker

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

— Peter F. Drucker

I don't think anybody yet has invented a pastime that's as much fun, or keeps you as young, as a good job.

— Frederick Hudson Ecker

I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

— Thomas A. Edison

I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun.

— Thomas A. Edison

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an ethic.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

How do I work? I grope.

— Albert Einstein

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Work is victory.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

My work is a game -- a very serious game.

— M. C. Escher

No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted word, failure and success and measure them by the eternal, not the earthly, standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be pre-eminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross -- was that a failure.

— Frederick Farrar

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours --all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

— William Faulkner

There isn't any luck that enters into anything, unless it's poker or shooting dice, maybe. There is no luck to merchandising. There is no luck in going out and working from early in the morning to long after dinner. That is not luck, it's work.

— Fred W. Fitch

Good work habits help develop an internal toughness and a self-confident attitude that will sustain you through every adversity and temporary discouragement.

— Paul J. Fleyer

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

— B. C. Forbes

If you have a job without aggravations, you don't have a job.

— Malcolm S. Forbes

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.

— Henry Ford

The object of living is work, experience, and happiness. There is joy in work. All that money can do is buy us someone else's work in exchange for our own. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

— Henry Ford

I don't need to be Tom Cruise. I just need to work forever.

— Jodie Foster

My father always told me, Find a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life.

— Jim Fox

Laziness may appear attractive but work gives satisfaction.

— Anne Frank

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

— Benjamin Franklin

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

— Milton Friedman

A champion of the working man has never yet been known to die of overwork.

— Robert Frost

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get Up in the morning and does not stop until you get to the office.

— Robert Frost

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?

— J. Paul Getty

Work is love made visible. And if you can't work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy.

— Kahlil Gibran

I don't have anything against work. I just figure, why deprive somebody who really loves it.

— Dobie Gillis

Like the bee, we should make our industry our amusement.

— Oliver Goldsmith

When work is a pleasure, life is joy.! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

— Maxim Gorky

Labor disgraces no man, but occasionally men disgrace labor.

— Ulysses S. Grant

I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

— Bruce Grocott

Intimate or drastic elements in the work of others are untouchable and should not be commented upon even in their absence. Private conflicts, quarrels, sentiments, animosities are unavoidable in any human group. It is our duty towards creation to keep these in check in so far as they might deform and wreck the work process.

— Jerzy Grotowski

Nothing is work unless you'd rather be doing something else.

— George Halas

My work is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels -- we know their names, they number a thousand for each red ribbon we wear here tonight. [Accepting his Best Actor Oscar for Philadelphia]

— Tom Hanks

As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.

— Katharine Hepburn

Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.

— Don Herold

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Work your way up or rust your way out.

— Holton

A shoe that is too large is apt to trip one, and when too small, to pinch the feet. So it is with those whose fortune does not suit them.

— Horace

Labor diligently to increase your property.

— Horace

If food were free, why work?

— Doug Horton

The highest reward that God gives us for good work is the ability to do better work.

— Elbert Hubbard

Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.

— Elbert Hubbard

Folks who never do any more than they get paid for, never get paid for anymore than they do.

— Elbert Hubbard

We work to become, not to acquire.

— Elbert Hubbard

Blessed is that man who has found his work.

— Elbert Hubbard

Personnel and their capacity for work on their exact jobs is the basic key to income and success.

— L. Ron Hubbard

If your work is becoming uninteresting, so are you. Work is an inanimate thing and can be made lively and interesting only by injecting yourself into it. Your job is only as big as you are.

— George C. Hubbs

Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

— Aldous Huxley

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

— Aldous Huxley

I am his mistress. His work is his wife.

— Marion Javits

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.

— Jerome K. Jerome

The sharp employ the sharp.

— Douglas William Jerrold

Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

— James Weldon Johnson

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

— Samuel Johnson

The world is moved along not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

— Helen Keller

My share of the work may be limited, but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

— Helen Keller

There is a kind of victory in good work, no matter how humble.

— Jack Kemp

Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.

— Rudyard Kipling

No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.

— KaThe Kollwitz