quotations about work
The truth is, everybody I've ever met who's successful is a workaholic.
ICE-T
Men's Health, December 2005
Anyone familiar with office life knows that it's not exactly a non-stop thrill ride: the ceaseless emails, the unnecessarily confusing business jargon, the knock-down, drag-out fights with the photocopier. We're all looking for a little delight amid the tedium, and it's driving a new school of corporate thought--one that's changing the way we work. These days, the happiness of individual employees comes second only to profits on the list of priorities. Gone are the days of cartoonishly horrible bosses; instead, more managers are positively hell-bent on putting a smile on your face.
KATIE UNDERWOOD
"Why developing friendships at work is so important", Canadian Business, January 27, 2016
Does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
A Diary
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
Playing games at work is a time-honored tradition. Windows computers come with Minesweeper and Solitaire for a reason, you know. But getting caught by the boss slacking off on company time isn't terribly good for your paycheck. If you're gaming on the clock, you need to be playing something that lets you cover your tracks.
K. THOR JENSEN
"The best games to secretly play at work", Geek, February 5, 2016
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of workers in the world, the people who do all the work, and the people who think they do all the work. The latter class is generally the busiest, the former never have time to be busy.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Past and Present
Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
The humblest workman has his place,
Which no one else can fill.
MAUD LINDSAY
"The Little Gray Pony", Mother Stories
The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
PAUL LAFARGUE
The Right to Be Lazy
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
To him that toileth God oweth glory, child of his toil.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
ARISTOTLE
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul
Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Like bees that are drowned in the honey which they make, the workmen are crushed by the wealth they create.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
The chances of a man's succeeding who does not love his work are very small. For all success costs labor.
FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP
Success: A Course in Moral Instruction
There is no substitute for hard work.
THOMAS EDISON
Life
How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can't slow down? They can't slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.
JAMES REDFIELD
The Celestine Prophecy
If you don't find a way to do something as work that is fulfilling and enjoyable, then your life is going to be really sad.
RUDOLPH GIULIANI
interview, May 3, 2003
We can imagine a world in which there is no work. A world bathed in incessant summer, whose seed-times and harvests are ever mingling, whose springing influences perpetually ascend, whose fruitage perpetually ripens through all the procession of its golden year. A world in which man would never feel the sting of want, And where the felicities of being would unfold without his effort. But we cannot conceive any such world, connected with human peculiarities and necessities, one half, one tithe so glorious as our old world of struggle and of labor. For wherever God has admitted man's agency the noblest results, the achievements of real worth and splendor are the fruits of patient and sinewy toil.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words