quotations about work
How strange it is that so many people have the belief that work is a burden and that idleness means happiness. Many are longing for the day that they will possess sufficient to quit work and take the world easy. They imagine that when that time comes their happiness will be complete. Alas, how many have reached this period of life to find themselves greatly disappointed! Idleness fails to give the happiness they expected and time drags more heavily than ever. The hardest job we ever tried was that of doing nothing.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
All work is an act of philosophy.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
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"
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
Hard work never hurt anyone who hired someone else to do it.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Past and Present
There's only one thing worse than to live without working, and that is to work without living.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
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
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
Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.
KARL MARX
"Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
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
Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
The Writing Life
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
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
"Do what you love" has become a modern-day mantra that devalues actual work while obscuring the vast majority of workers. After all, if some work is elevated to being worthy of love, where does that leave all those doing unglamorous and menial work? They are nowhere, blanked from the culture, their lowly status even seen as somehow deserved because they didn't love hard enough.... We need to acknowledge all work as work, whatever it is, and to stand in solidarity with all who labour, whether they love their job or not. Our concern should not be with the select few occupations that are loveable but with making all employment more likeable -- through fair wages, job security, safe conditions and reasonable hours.
SIMON CASTLES
"Do what you love mantra devalues hard work", The Age, February 9, 2016
When he worked, he really worked. But when he played, he really PLAYED.
DR. SEUSS
The King's Stilts
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
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
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