quotations about work
Anyone can do the job when things are going right.
ERNEST K. GANN
Fate is the Hunter
Many companies see happiness at work as an intangible "nice to have", rather than an important organisational priority. While you can't force employees to be happy -- or control every factor that contributes to happiness -- it's still possible to create the conditions that will help to promote happiness and positivity at work.
ROBERT HALF
"Happiness at work -- is it natural or necessary?", Business Zone, March 31, 2017
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
If we look at things from a results level -- what hours one puts in -- which is, I think, where we're going in the future of work, then we're going to have to balance our lives a little better. And, therefore, the organisational challenge really will be how we facilitate people to do that.
MARGOT SLATTERY
"Data is absolutely essential to the future of work", Silicon Republic, March 23, 2017
Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.
KARL MARX
"Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic
See that bunch of loafers on the street corner. They seldom work, and how they live no one can tell. Are they happy? Nay, nay; the good boxes on which they sit testify to their restlessness, for they have tried to while away their long hours by whittling them, when there was nothing else on hand to help pass the time. Certainly the idle, yawning, gaping, stretching loafer is not an ideal of a happy life.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
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
Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
Lust
When he worked, he really worked. But when he played, he really PLAYED.
DR. SEUSS
The King's Stilts
Slow work produces fine goods.
CHINESE PROVERB
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
ARISTOTLE
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul
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
The humblest workman has his place,
Which no one else can fill.
MAUD LINDSAY
"The Little Gray Pony", Mother Stories
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
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
When the toiler bends and labors till his sweat turns into pearls,
'Tis a nobler decoration than the coronets of earls.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Caelestis"
There is no substitute for hard work.
THOMAS EDISON
Life
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
L. P. JACKS
Education Through Recreation
Every man is better for a period of work under the open sky.
HENRY FORD
My Life and Work
It just seems so useless to have to work so hard and nothin' ever really seems to come from it.
TOM PETTY
Here Comes My Girl