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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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.” Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“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

“Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed...” Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“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

“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

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

“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

“Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it you are lost.” Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

“Gods don’t like people not doing much work. People who aren’t busy all the time might start to think.” Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Political work is the life-blood of all economic work.” Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung

“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

“Go before the people with your example, and be laborious in their affairs.” Confucius, Analects

“I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.” Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four

“I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really...” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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Related topics

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

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Heraclitus (2)
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Charles Bukowski (2)
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Anne Frank (2)
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Related sources

My Life and Work (4)
The Conquest of Happiness (4)
The Fountainhead (4)
Little Women (3)
Three Men in a Boat (3)
Analects (2)
The Diary of a Young Girl (2)
On Nature (2)
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Past and Present (2)
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (2)
The Wind in the Willows (2)
Theodore Roosevelt; an Autobiography (2)
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The Wealth of Nations (2)
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