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Work quotes

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

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

“Human life and human labour were near. I must struggle on: strive to live and bend to toil like the rest.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“Work without love is slavery.” Mother Teresa, Where There Is Love, There Is God

“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

“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

“Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.” Albert Camus, The Plague

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.” Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“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

“our labour preserves us from three great evils—weariness, vice, and want.” Voltaire, Candide

“God gave the day, God gave the strength. And the day and the strength were consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own reward.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

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

“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

“Even sleepers and dreamers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.” Heraclitus, On Nature

“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

“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

“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

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

“Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance; yonder palace was raised by single stones, yet you see its height and spaciousness.” Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

“If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.” Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.” Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.” Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present

“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.” Barack Obama, Inaugural Address

“What’s a philosopher? . . . Someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting” Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

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

“I always channel my emotions into my work. That way I don't hurt anyone but myself.” Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recours to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.” Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“This week I've been reading a lot and doing little work. That's the way things ought to be. That's surely the road to success.” Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.” Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him.” John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'One word at a time,' and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time,...” Stephen King, The Stand

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Related topics

women success reward labour passion life God reading idleness education strength equality dreams duty effort love hope thinking interest learning

Related authors

Confucius (2)
Charles Bukowski (2)
Heraclitus (2)
Ayn Rand (5)
Henry Ford (4)
Bertrand Russell (4)
Jerome K. Jerome (4)
Louisa May Alcott (3)
Anne Frank (3)
Terry Pratchett (3)
Theodore Roosevelt (2)
Oscar Wilde (2)
Samuel Butler (2)
George Orwell (2)
Stephen King (2)
A. W. Tozer (2)
G. K. Chesterton (2)
Adam Smith (2)
Tennessee Williams (2)
Andy Warhol (2)

Related sources

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