Motivational Quotes

Work

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

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Work

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

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

Richard Bach

The object of living is work, experience, and happiness. There is joy in work. All that money can do is buy us someone else's work in exchange for our own. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

Ford, Henry

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

Whitehorn, Katharine

The effectiveness of work increases according to geometric progression if there are no interruptions.

Maurois, Andre

Anything that comes easy, comes wrong.

Tessier, Josephine

Plaster thick, some will stick.

Proverb

The time spent in trying to impress others could be spent in doing the things by which others would be impressed.

Romer, Frank

My work is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels -- we know their names, they number a thousand for each red ribbon we wear here tonight. [Accepting his Best Actor Oscar for Philadelphia]

Hanks, Tom

10.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

11.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

Peter Drucker

12.

The welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all.

Keller, Helen

13.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Marx, Karl

17.

You've got to find what you love and that is as true for work as it is for lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you've found it.

Steve Jobs

18.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

If a team is to reach its potential, each player must be willing to subordinate his personal goals to the good of the team.

Wilkinson, Bud

20.

When you choose the paradigm of service, it turns everything you do from a job into a gift.

Oprah Winfrey

21.

The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

22.

Work is necessary for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

Picasso, Pablo

23.

A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Dorothy L. Sayers

24.

How can there be so much difference between a day off and an off day?

25.

Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials -- to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman's hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her; she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.

Mead, Margaret

26.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Huxley, Aldous

27.

Work will win when wishy washy wishing won t.

Monson, Thomas S.

28.

Working from home meant we could vary snack and coffee breaks, change our desks or view, goof off, drink on the job, even spend the day in pajamas, and often meet to gossip or share ideas. On the other hand, we bossed ourselves around, set impossible goals, and demanded longer hours than office jobs usually entail. It was the ultimate "flextime," in that it depended on how flexible we felt each day, given deadlines, distractions, and workaholic crescendos.

Diane Ackerman

29.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Baudelaire, Charles

30.

No one man is superior to the game.

Giamatti, A. Bartlett

31.

If your work is becoming uninteresting, so are you. Work is an inanimate thing and can be made lively and interesting only by injecting yourself into it. Your job is only as big as you are.

Hubbs, George C.

32.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

33.

A man grows most tired while standing still.

Proverb, Chinese

34.

Most teams aren't teams at all but merely collections of individual relationships with the boss. Each individual vying with the others for power, prestige and position.

Mcgregor, Douglas Murray

35.

I have never liked working. To me a job is an invasion of privacy.

Mcgoorty, Danny

36.

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Lombardi, Vince

37.

Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.

Herold, Don

38.

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

39.

The daily grind of hard work gets a person polished.

40.

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

Thomas A. Edison

41.

Getting fired is nature's way to telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place.

Hal Lancaster

42.

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

Twain, Mark

43.

A well-run restaurant is like a winning baseball team. It makes the most of every crew member's talent and takes advantage of every split-second opportunity to speed up service.

Ogilvy, David

44.

When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.

Coolidge, Calvin

45.

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

Book, William Frederick

46.

Life is just a dirty four-letter word: W-O-R-K.

Mcevoy, J. P.

47.

People have been known to achieve more as a result of working with others than against them.

Fromme, Dr. Allan

48.

At daybreak, when loath to rise, have this thought in thy mind: I am rising for a man's work.

Syrus, Publilius

49.

Housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human self-actualization.

Oakley, Ann

50.

We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always be done.

Roosevelt, Theodore