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Work quotes

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“No work with interest is ever hard.” Henry Ford, “My Life and Work” - 1922

“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.” Confucius, “Analects”

“Every man’s work . . . is always a portrait of himself” Samuel Butler, “The Way of All Flesh” - 1903

“The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way.” Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead” - 1943

“Have regular hours for work and play, make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life become a beautiful...” Louisa May Alcott, “Little Women” - 1868

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else...” Charles Bukowski, “Factotum” - 1975

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Karl Marx, “Das Kapital” - 1867

“I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my...” Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead” - 1943

“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” Albert Einstein, “The world as I see it” - 1949

“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him.” Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations” - 1776

“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.” Andy Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” - 1975

“A person who has not done one-half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.” Emily Brontë, “Wuthering Heights” - 1847

“Every noble work is at first impossible.” Thomas Carlyle, “Past and Present” - 1843

“But the joy of life is a very good thing, and while work is the essential in it, play also has its place.” Theodore Roosevelt, “Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography” - 1913

“Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.” A. W. Tozer, “The Pursuit of God” - 1948

“the woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed.” G. K. Chesterton, “What's Wrong with the World” - 1910

“I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do.” Jerome K. Jerome, “Three Men in a Boat” - 1889

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish” J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Fellowship of the Ring” - 1954

“The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “This Side of Paradise” - 1920

“Packing the basket was not quite such pleasant work as unpacking the basket. It never is.” Kenneth Grahame, “The Wind in the Willows” - 1908

“Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work, and helps make something of the world.” Heraclitus, “On Nature” - c. 535 – c. 475 BCE

“there's no such thing as a lousy job—only lousy men who don't care to do it.” Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” - 1957

“It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. ” A. W. Tozer, “The Pursuit of God” - 1948

“Work, love, courage and hope, Make me good and help me cope!” Anne Frank, “The Diary of a Young Girl” - 1947

“it wasn't enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.” Charles Bukowski, “Factotum” - 1975

“Whether you’re doing a bicep curl in a chilly gym or talking to world leaders, there are no shortcuts—everything is reps, reps, reps.” Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story” - 2012

“It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; 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...” Jerome K. Jerome, “Three Men in a Boat” - 1889

“A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.” Bertrand Russell, “The Conquest of Happiness” - 1930

“Never ask people. Not about your work.” Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead” - 1943

“The chief one was to remember that camping was a good way to find out people’s characters. Those who were selfish showed it very soon, in that they wanted the best bed or the best food and did not want to do their share of the work.” Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt” - 1961

“Even sleepers and dreamers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.” Heraclitus, “On Nature” - c. 535 – c. 475 BCE

“There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity of work.” Henry Ford, “My Life and Work” - 1922

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out...” Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations” - 1776

“we must cultivate our garden.” Voltaire, “Candide” - 1759

“In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or lower grade,—of great corporations.” Woodrow Wilson, “The New Freedom” - 1913

“Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.” Theodore Roosevelt, “Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography” - 1913

“Thinking is the hardest work any one can do—which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers.” Henry Ford, “My Life and Work” - 1922

“One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster.” Bertrand Russell, “The Conquest of Happiness” - 1930

“Psychoanalysis is justly suspicious. One of its rules reads: Whatever disturbs the continuation of the work is a resistance.” Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams” - 1899

“Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour.” Leonardo da Vinci, “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci” - 1478 – 1519

“The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.” Bertrand Russell, “The Conquest of Happiness” - 1930

“After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” Kenneth Grahame, “The Wind in the Willows” - 1908

“There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do.” Jerome K. Jerome, “Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow” - 1886

“Indeed, I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.” Oscar Wilde, “The Remarkable Rocket” - 1888

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.” Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest” - 1895

“It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.” Franz Kafka, “The Trial” - 1925

“The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.” George Bernard Shaw, “Man and Superman” - 1903

“Enable every woman who can work to take her place on the labour front, under the principle of equal pay for equal work.” Mao Zedong, “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung” - 1964

“Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.” Orson Scott Card, “Ender's Game” - 1985

“If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it.” Paulo Coelho, “The Alchemist” - 1988

Related topics

life God idleness women success reading hope labour reward love passion strength play invention equality money humility effort duty education

Related authors

Ayn Rand (5)
Bertrand Russell (4)
Jerome K. Jerome (4)
Henry Ford (4)
Oscar Wilde (2)
Heraclitus (2)
Adam Smith (2)
Theodore Roosevelt (2)
Confucius (2)
Louisa May Alcott (2)
Thomas Carlyle (2)
Samuel Butler (2)
Charles Bukowski (2)
Arnold Schwarzenegger (2)
A. W. Tozer (2)
Samuel Johnson (2)
Terry Pratchett (2)
Stephen King (2)
Kenneth Grahame (2)
Voltaire (2)

Related sources

The Fountainhead (4)
The Conquest of Happiness (4)
My Life and Work (4)
Three Men in a Boat (3)
On Nature (2)
The Wealth of Nations (2)
Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography (2)
Analects (2)
Little Women (2)
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story (2)
The Pursuit of God (2)
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (2)
The Wind in the Willows (2)
Candide (2)
The Diary of a Young Girl (2)
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (2)
The Glass Menagerie (2)
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (2)
Factotum (2)
Small Gods (2)