quotations about work
Retirement wasn't a reward at the end of a well-run career ... it was a void surrounded by endless dull hours, haunted by memories of work.
NORA ROBERTS
Blue Smoke
I have never been able to draw a line between work and pleasure.
ANNA BALAKIAN
New York Times, August 15, 1997
The 21st-century adage of a work/life balance makes the nature of work as personally positive and enjoyable apparently incidental to our lives, the two understood as disparate entities rather than entwined for our pleasure 24/7.
PAULYNE POGORELSKE
"Faith: work is not a dirty word", The Age, March 25, 2017
The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
ROBERT FROST
attributed, The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom
The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.
KARL MARX
"Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.
KOBO ABE
The Woman in the Dunes
The highest reward that God gives us for good work is the ability to do better work.
ELBERT HUBBARD
Selected Writings
Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not to be the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery only if it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Gay Science
Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work body and soul.
CHARLES BUXTON
Notes of Thought
People say they love hard workers but they really love natural talent--a bias with troubling implications when it comes to hiring.
ERIC JAFFE
"Hard Work Is Overrated", fastcodesign, January 19, 2016
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?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison--
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.
PHILIP LARKIN
"Toads"
No man ever did or can do a great work alone.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Anyone can do the job when things are going right.
ERNEST K. GANN
Fate is the Hunter
The phrase "work-life balance" tells us that people think that work is the opposite of life. We should be talking about life-life balance.
PATRICK DIXON
Building a Better Business
A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby.... The man is now a man.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Past and Present
Hard work never hurt anyone who hired someone else to do it.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
The truth is, everybody I've ever met who's successful is a workaholic.
ICE-T
Men's Health, December 2005
I need that job, and I hate like hell that I do, but I need it. And I'm not working there because I need an allowance. I'm paying for a mortgage and putting food on the table and buying clothes for three kids. I don't think you'd even understand that. I don't think you understand anything. You're not grown up enough yet to understand that your life doesn't always turn out the way you plan it to be, and sometimes you end up doing stuff you thought you'd never do in a million years, but you still have to do it 'cause there's nothing else you can do.
ROSEANNE BARR
"Chicken Hearts", Roseanne
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
ELBERT HUBBARD
A Thousand and One Epigrams