quotations about work
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
J. M. BARRIE
attributed, The New Dictionary of Thoughts
The highest reward that God gives us for good work is the ability to do better work.
ELBERT HUBBARD
Selected Writings
Hard work is rewarding. Taking credit for other people's hard work is rewarding and faster.
SCOTT ADAMS
Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life: Dispatches from Cubicleland
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
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
The 21st-century adage of a work/life balance makes the nature of work as personally positive and enjoyable apparently incidental to our lives, the two understood as disparate entities rather than entwined for our pleasure 24/7.
PAULYNE POGORELSKE
"Faith: work is not a dirty word", The Age, March 25, 2017
One in three stressed workers is turning to comfort foods, such as chocolate, biscuits, doughnuts and crisps, as therapy. The figure rises to four in ten of those aged 35 to 44 as they battle to meet deadlines, wade through blizzards of emails and balance long hours with a family life. The pressure to achieve and bring in a good salary means career takes precedence over family for four in ten fathers and one in four mothers, according to a new study. Eating is generally seen as a more powerful way to cope with problems than exercise or talking things through with friends, family or colleagues.
SEAN POULTER
"How stress at work drives one in three employees to reach for the biscuit tin, chocolate or doughnuts", Daily Mail, February 5, 2016
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
ELBERT HUBBARD
A Thousand and One Epigrams
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
WARREN BEATTY
The Best Liberal Quotes Ever: Why the Left is Right
The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.
KARL MARX
"Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Hard work never hurt anyone who hired someone else to do it.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Who first invented work and bound the free
And holiday-rejoicing spirit down
To the unremitting importunity
Of business, in the green fields, and the town;
To plough, loom, anvil, spade--and oh! most sad!
To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood?
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,
SABBATHLESS SATAN!
CHARLES LAMB
"Sonnet", The Examiner, June 20, 1819
I love working for myself; it's so empowering. Except when I call in sick. I always know when I'm lying.
RITA RUDNER
stand-up routine
The only way to go beyond work is through work. It is not that work itself is valuable; we surmount work by work. The real value of work lies in the strength of self-denial.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
ROBERT FROST
attributed, The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom
A work well begun is half ended.
PLATO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work body and soul.
CHARLES BUXTON
Notes of Thought
How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can't slow down? They can't slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.
JAMES REDFIELD
The Celestine Prophecy
Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Thus have men become the creatures of their work, and thus has work become to them, in many respects, a curse. When work enslaves a group of faculties, and employs and develops that group to the neglect or the death of all others, then does it surpass and abuse its office. This it is that makes one-sided men, partial men, fractional men. This it is that puts the menial stamp upon men, that brands them with the name of their tyrant-master. This it is which spoils manhood, and debases its subjects to the level of their calling. This it is which too often transforms men into lawyers and financiers and ministers and merchants and farmers and hod-carriers -- beings who can do one thing, and nothing else.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
"Work and Play", Complete Works