quotations about work
A foreman, if he's got a conscience, and delights in his work, will do his business as well as if he was a partner. I wouldn't give a penny for a man as 'ud drive a nail in slack because he didn't get extra pay for it.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Human, All Too Human
Work was associated with a war, and military jargon became part of everyday work life. We are led by "officers", we "kill the competition", "target" clients, work "in the trenches" and "on the front lines", develop "strategy" and "drive campaigns".
NATALIA BLAGOEVA
"Thank God It's Monday and the End of Work-Life Balance", Huffington Post, March 21, 2017
Work is the weapon of honor; he who lacks the weapon will never triumph.
D. G. MITCHELL
attributed, Day's Collacon
The phrase "work-life balance" tells us that people think that work is the opposite of life. We should be talking about life-life balance.
PATRICK DIXON
Building a Better Business
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
LEO TOLSTOY
"Stop and Think!", Essays, Letters, Miscellanies
A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby.... The man is now a man.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Past and Present
The truth is, everybody I've ever met who's successful is a workaholic.
ICE-T
Men's Health, December 2005
I have never been able to draw a line between work and pleasure.
ANNA BALAKIAN
New York Times, August 15, 1997
How strange it is that so many people have the belief that work is a burden and that idleness means happiness. Many are longing for the day that they will possess sufficient to quit work and take the world easy. They imagine that when that time comes their happiness will be complete. Alas, how many have reached this period of life to find themselves greatly disappointed! Idleness fails to give the happiness they expected and time drags more heavily than ever. The hardest job we ever tried was that of doing nothing.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
Though thousands of people indulge themselves in it regularly, and even develop a taste for it, there is no doubt in my mind (and that of scientists whom I employ to prove it) that Work is a dangerous and destructive drug, and should be called by its right name, which is Fatigue.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks
There's only one thing worse than to live without working, and that is to work without living.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Life is so simple when you're just doing your job.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Hard work cheerfully done is easy work, while light work unwillingly done is mere drudgery.
E. P. DAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
All work is an act of philosophy.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
No man ever did or can do a great work alone.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
A Diary
We can imagine a world in which there is no work. A world bathed in incessant summer, whose seed-times and harvests are ever mingling, whose springing influences perpetually ascend, whose fruitage perpetually ripens through all the procession of its golden year. A world in which man would never feel the sting of want, And where the felicities of being would unfold without his effort. But we cannot conceive any such world, connected with human peculiarities and necessities, one half, one tithe so glorious as our old world of struggle and of labor. For wherever God has admitted man's agency the noblest results, the achievements of real worth and splendor are the fruits of patient and sinewy toil.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words