Motivational Quotes

Work

You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

- Randall Munroe, xkcd

Best Quotes about Work

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

Vaneigem, Raoul

You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

Randall Munroe, xkcd

The work will stand, no matter what.

Streep, Meryl

I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.

Austen, Jane

The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.

Lombardi, Vince

Poor workers! First they're cuckolded, and, as if that weren't enough, then they're beaten! Work's a curse, Saturno. I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation --that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno --I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it!

Bunuel, Luis

Our works decay and disappear but God gentlest works stay looking down on the ruins we toil to rear.

Smith, Dr. Walter

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an ethic.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Twain, Mark

10.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

That's what being in the working class is all about -- how to get out of it.

Wran, Neville Kenneth

12.

Men have become the tools of their trade.

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?

Marquis, Don

14.

When a milestone is conquered, the subtle erosion called entitlement begins its consuming grind. The team regards its greatness as a trait and a right. Half hearted effort becomes habit and saps a champion.

Riley, Pat

15.

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.

Ogden Nash

16.

Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.

Sam Ewing

17.

My share of the work may be limited, but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

Keller, Helen

18.

The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed, saying: There is life, but it's not for you.

Mortimer, John

19.

If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

20.

Whoever does not love his work cannot hope that it will please others.

21.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.

Ford, Henry

22.

I think any player will tell you that individual accomplishments help your ego, but if you don't win, it makes for a very, very long season. It counts more that the team has played well.

Robinson, David

23.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in --that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

Mother Teresa

24.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.

Vaneigem, Raoul

26.

When he took time to help the man up the mountain, lo, he scaled it himself.

27.

Bodily labor alleviates the pains of the mind and from this arises the happiness of the poor.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

28.

Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

Thomas A. Edison

29.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours --all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

Faulkner, William

30.

Feeding the hungry is a greater work than raising the dead.

Chrysosatom, St. John

31.

A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.

W. Somerset Maugham

32.

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

Horace

33.

I've had smarter people around me all my life, but I haven't run into one yet that can outwork me. And if they can't outwork you, then smarts aren't going to do them much good. That's just the way it is. And if you believe that and live by it, you'd be surprised at how much fun you can have.

Hayes, Woody

34.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work -- the chance to find yourself. Your own reality -- for yourself, not for others -- which no other man can ever know.

Conrad, Joseph

35.

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off?

Larkin, Philip

36.

People forget how fast you did a job - but they remember how well you did it.

Howard Newton

37.

Hard work brings prosperity; playing around brings poverty.

Bible

38.

Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

Johnson, James Weldon

39.

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Sir William Osler

40.

The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.

Arnold, Matthew

41.

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.

Reich, Robert B.

42.

It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.

Hill, Napoleon

43.

Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity.

Lombardi, Vince

44.

I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes -- and six months later you have to start all over again.

Rivers, Joan

45.

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

Richard Bach

46.

Work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great images in whose presence [His Or Her] heart first opened.

Camus, Albert

47.

What is the good of being a genius if you cannot use it as an excuse for being unemployed?

Barzan, Gerald

48.

As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.

Hepburn, Katharine

49.

A man must drive his energy, not be driven by it.

Book, William Frederick

50.

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

Carlyle, Thomas