c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.
— Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
Then a ploughman said , speak to us of work : in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life ,And to love life throught labour is to be intimate with inmost secrets .And what is it to work with love ?it is to weave the colth with threads from your heart , even as if your beloved were to wear that colth .It is to build a house with affection , even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house .It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy , even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit .It is to change all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit .He who works in marble , and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone , is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
When did life start being something you had to work at and not something that just is?
— Brian James, Pure Sunshine
I often think about dogs when I think about work and retirement. There are many breeds of dog that just need to be working, and useful, or have a job of some kind, in order to be happy. Otherwise they are neurotically barking, scratching, or tearing up the sofa. A working dog needs to work. And I am a working dog.
— Martha Sherrill
After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited--long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms--what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
He had a charm about him sometimes, a warmth that was irresistible, like sunshine. He planted Saffy triumphantly on the pavement, opened the taxi door, slung in his bag, gave a huge film-star wave, called, "All right, Peter? Good weekend?" to the taxi driver, who knew him well and considered him a lovely man, and was free."Back to the hard life," he said to Peter, and stretched out his legs.Back to the real life, he meant. The real world where there were no children lurking under tables, no wives wiping their noses on the ironing, no guinea pigs on the lawn, nor hamsters in the bedrooms, and no paper bags full of leaking tomato sandwiches.
— Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel
Imagine that you are stuck on a long train ride and must choose one of two books to read in order to pass the time: the first is a novel whose main character is an office worker who is essentially working to pay his monthly cable bill; the second is about someone who decides to travel in South America (and of course encounters various setbacks in the process), but who pushes beyond the boundaries of conventional American life. Which... book would you pick up to read? Indeed, which of the two characters would you rather be?
— Mark Thompson
There was a sergeant at a desk. I knew he was a sergeant because I recognized the marks on his uniform, and I knew it was a desk because it's always a desk. There's always someone at a desk, except when it's a table that functions as a desk. You sit behind a desk, and everyone knows you're supposed to be there, and that you're doing something that involves your brain. It's an odd, special kind of importance. I think everyone should get a desk; you can sit behind it when you feel like you don't matter.
— Steven Brust, Iorich
Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.
— Howard Schultz, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
All my life I've been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard.
— Glenn T. Seaborg
There is never a traffic jam created from people going the extra mile
— Jeff Dixon
Wasted strokes, like missed deadlines, are preventable and costly.
— Lorii Myers, Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace
If you don't interfere with me, I'll always do something really good.
— John Malkovich
Because I'm a man who works, who knows what a human being is like inside, who knows that every human being has his worth, and who wants the world to be governed by work and not by opinions about work.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
Work will drive you crazy if you let it.
— Patrick deWitt, Ablutions
Why do I have to do the sewin'? 'Cause I'm a girl? Is that it? It ain't fair, I tell ya!
— Seán Cullen, Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates
The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother and her child.
— Joan C. Williams, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter
Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.
— Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis Of Culture
The reward of a work is to have produced it
—  the reward of effort is to have grown by it.
I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life
Ideas do not work..It is YOU who has to do the work....
— Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom
Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few great men could pass personnel. 
— Paul Goodman
Let your autobiography contain these words; "I was able to think positively, love affectionately and work efficiently". Thinking, loving and working are what make us different from animals and trees.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the secret of fulfillment is "to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.
— Winifred Gallagher
Don't allow yourself to feel guilty about wanting deep and endless love, amazing sex and opportunities that will change your life. Expect these things - work for them and don't ever stop until they're yours.
— Jennifer Elisabeth
It's called entrepreneurSHIP, not entrepreneurSIT. Don't wait. Just ship.
— Richie Norton
Work may be your dominant thought, and joy an afterthought. But joy is your true purpose, and work the afterthought.
— Alan Cohen
It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious. 
— Kin Hubbard
There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone--many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF -- 'Thank God It's Friday.' They live for the weekends, when they can go do what they really want to do.
— Richard N. Bolles
The symbol of the Lotus flower gives a precious teaching that can inspire us to deal with life in the best possible way. Its roots take nourishment from muddy waters and yet bloom in full delicacy and beauty on the surface. Similarly, to have a positive mindset is a beautiful quality; nonetheless to be transformational it needs to be rooted firmly in reality to then blossom with the value which can be created from the muddy problem(s)
— Dorotea Brandin, Heart to heart(s) Communication @ work.Universal values of Buddhism to inspire open, compassionate and effective communication
Why would you turn right on a red light when we can all just sit here behind you waiting to die... #AHOLE
— A.O. Storm, An A-Hole Goes To Work
So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.
— Jack London, To Build a Fire and Other Stories
What is he to learn? To imitate? Or to avoid? When your friends the bees worry themselves about their sovereign, and become perfectly distracted touching the slightest monarchical movement, are we men to learn the greatness of Tuft-hunting, or the littleness of the Court Circular? I am not clear, Mr. Boffin, but that the hive may be satirical.'At all events, they work,' said Mr. Boffin.Ye-es,' returned Eugene, disparagingly, 'they work; but don't you think they overdo it?
— Charles Dickens
When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work.
— Michael  Harris
No, they didn’t have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smooth in places, or lumpy, but joined. The work and the living you did was the same things, not separated out like today.
— Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
When you do your work happily, work will disappear.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Love turns work into rest.
— Teresa of Ávila
The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
My work was done, so it was time to start digging my grave again.
— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
Assiduity, it means sit down until you do it. Commit yourself to your work and study.
— Lucas Remmerswaal, The A-Z of 13 Habits: Inspired by Warren Buffett
Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to....How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don't own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coercive means, destroys industries. Organized labor is piracy without the boats and eye patches. Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor?
— Douglas Wilson
You'll have to leave my meals on a tray outside the door because I'll beworking pretty late on the secret of making myself invisible, which may take me almost until eleven o'clock.
— S.J. Perelman
All work is the avoidance of harder work.
— James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.
— James Richardson, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms
When humans work, they frequently become unaware of their own body, their own senses, are surprised to find that their wrists ache or their backs are sore or their friend has left the building. It's as close to an out-of-body experience as can be achieved short of fifty volts, a circle of warding, a pigeon's claw cut from an albino female of purest white feathers, or a lot of mushrooms.
— Kate Griffin, A Madness of Angels
I am unpersuaded that relative poverty and hard work are greater adversities than relative affluence and free time.
— Dallin H. Oaks
Sadly, in our technological, impersonal, and avaricious consumer society, people merely hold on to jobs. They put in their time, leave at the five o'clock bell, pick up their pay checks, and leave the whole business behind them. Work, for so many, becomes a necessary evil. They go at it grudgingly, at best resignedly. It is hard to fault them; the stressful conditions and uncertainty under which so many workers labor force them into an adversarial relationship with their occupations and employers.
— Robert Dykstra, She Never Said Good-Bye
Will that be all?” I asked the pimply faced teen who ogled my exposed legs as if in heat. My pen tapped impatiently on the notepad while I waited for him to look up. Slowly his dull grey eyes roved over my body and a limp smile drew up his thin, crusted lips making him look more weasel than human. “Yep. That’d be it,” his cheerful, adolescent voice cracked.“Great,” I mumbled, walking back behind the counter.
— Brandi Salazar, Faerie Tales: The Misfortune of a Teenage Socialite
If you’re not afraid of working hard, self-reliance comes easy!
— Lorii Myers, Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace
Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
Life is short, so live it full! Know that the work that the Lord has begun in you, He will finish it. So, honor Him today with your gift to Him, "steadfastness/endurance to live His work, and not yours. It may get tough along this journey where the enemy speaks "quit", but remember, God is not through with what He began in you. In God, your life shall be made full and complete( whole)!
— Anita R. Sneed-Carter
Work hard, put maximum effort, and have a good attitude. Most importantly never give up.
— Ana Monnar
As the connections have been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness. And there is work that is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of connections - as one is now said to work "for a living" or "to support a family" - but the enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love. (pg. 133, The Body and the Earth)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living
— Jerome K. Jerome
Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.
— Amy Lowell
I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet - the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that spoke volumes about the human condition. I wondered how you stop caring about what you've ached over, sweated over. (Thwonk)
— Joan Bauer
We have to examine the extent to which we export poverty to other societies. When we decide that we will import products from China that are produced by people earning less than a dollar an hour, and grant their country most-favored-nation status (political contributions notwithstanding), we are deciding to make American workers who must earn the minimum wage compete with them. I am not suggesting that we close the doors to China or to Mexico, but I am suggesting that we look very carefully at the web of international relationships that we are creating. At the very minimum, we should understand that we have two choices in our country: we can raise world living standards by exporting those standards, or we can lower living standards- not only the world’s but also our own- by deciding that it is acceptable for the products of exploited labor to enter this country.
— Julianne Malveaux
I just realized that sleep sometimes is the only precious wage for the hard working man.
— Akilnathan Logeswaran
There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.
— Adrian Tan
The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man.
— Erich Fromm, On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying No to Power
A noble minded person is not an implement.
— Confucius, The Analects
There should be no separation between spontaneous work with an emotional tone and work directed by the intellect. Both are supplementary to each other and must be regarded as intimately connected. Discipline and freedom are thus to be seen as elements of equal weight, each partaking of the other.
— Armin Hofmann
We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsible within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone. (pg. 134, The Body and the Earth)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
The truth is despite the hard work and juggling required to keep the different facets of the frantic life afloat, the "superwoman" has one marvelous compensation. Being busy and being seen to be busy lets you off the hook. Buys you a way out of all aspects of your many roles you secretly despise ... like cleaning cupboards ... or entertaining your husband's business friends. When you combine wife, mother, career and all, each role become the perfect excuse for avoiding the worst aspects of the other.
— Bettina Arndt
If the least thing goes wrong with a saddle, or clothes, or a boot, you cannot find a soul to make repairs, and the other day a cobbler answered us, 'Yes, that's right, I'm a shoemaker, and sometimes I work, but I'm not in the mood right now.
— Louis-Philippe, Journal de mon voyage d'Amérique
(Sadie)"I'm not judging you, Dylan. I love vampire movies. If I looked surprised it was only because it's so different from your TV work, that's all."His shoulders relaxed a notch. "Sorry. Olly gives me a lot of shit for selling out. He doesn't get that no one is ever going to make his movie about two old men on a fishing trip. Or, even if they do, no one is every going to go see it.
— Sarah Mayberry, Take on Me
When we start being too impressed by the results of our work, we slowly come to the erroneous conviction that life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing the points to measure our worth. And before we are fully aware of it, we have sold our soul to the many grade-givers. That means we are not only in the world, but also of the world. Then we become what the world makes us. We are intelligent because someone gives us a high grade. We are helpful because someone says thanks. We are likable because someone likes us. And we are important because someone considers us indispensable. In short, we are worthwhile because we have successes. And the more we allow our accomplishments — the results of our actions — to become the criteria of our self-esteem, the more we are going to walk on our mental and spiritual toes, never sure if we will be able to live up to the expectations which we created by our last successes. In many people’s lives, there is a nearly diabolic chain in which their anxieties grow according to their successes. This dark power has driven many of the greatest artists into self-destruction.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life
We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.
— Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish.
— E.M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer
To do the work of others is slavery. To do the work of God is true liberation.
— Anonymous
Sibyl, what do you want?”“I want to live,” the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. “I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
Bodily agitation, then, is an enemy to the spirit. And by agitation I do not necessarily mean exercise or movement. There is all the difference in the world between agitation and work.Work occupies the body and the mind and is necessary for the health of the spirit. Work can help us to pray and be recollected if we work properly. Agitation, however, destroys the spiritual usefulness of work and even tends to frustrate its physical and social purpose. Agitation is the useless and ill-directed action of the body. It expresses the inner confusion of a soul without peace. Work brings peace to the soul that has a semblance of order and spiritual understanding. It helps the soul to focus upon its spiritual aims and to achieve them. But the whole reason for agitation is to hide the soul from itself, to camouflage its interior conflicts and their purposelessness, and to induce a false feeling that 'we are getting somewhere'.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
In science, work (W) is done when force (F) move a body through a distance (D). It is the same with our every day affairs. When you don't progress, no work is done irrespective of the force (power) you have
— Israelmore Ayivor
Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.
— Greg Iles, Turning Angel
Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know.
— Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away
Don’t work too hard. Try to maintain balance. Don’t make work your whole life.
— Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing
Believe that you are the best at what you do. And work hard on your abilities, to make it true.
— Ellen J. Barrier
It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Saturday off and coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller, if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing or- anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!
— Margaret Widdemer, The Rose-Garden Husband
Billionaires’ working hours are twenty-four seven. They don’t wait till Monday.
— Sophie Page, To Marry a Prince
I did not myself set a high estimation on wealth, and had the affectation of most young men of lively imagination, who suppose that they can better dispense with the possession of money, than resign their time and faculties to the labour necessary to acquire it.
— Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Work is tough for everyone but for Kyle Shannon, it's just murder.
— Linda Mickey
You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.
— Neil Gaiman
If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.
— Darryl F. Zanuck
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
— Alain de Botton
[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families--only to find that by then their families were gone.
— Larissa MacFarquhar
To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.
— Samuel Butler
I feel like every project I work on is a dream project, so long as I am learning.
— Simeon Kondev
Sometimes it’s hard to know when you’ve crossed the line from conscientious to compulsive. When you’re in the thick of an assignment, it’s easy to believe that you must spend so much time brainstorming, researching, writing, testing, revising or what-have-you. Often, it’s only after you’ve been working for hours on end that you realize that half the work you’ve been doing wasn’t actually necessary and that you’ve just wasted a lot of time.
— Michael Law
You know, I know I should be just as panicky as you about the filthy work - one wants to do nothing in the evenings, certainly not spread rotten books around & dredge for a 'line'. It must be like still being a student, with an essay to do after a week's drinking, only you haven't had the drinking. Quite clearly, to me, you aren't a voluntary worker, from the will: you do it by intuitive flashes, more like an act of creation, & when the flashes don't come, as of course they don't, especially when the excess energy of undergraduate days is gone, then it is a hideous unnatural effort.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
If you agree to work for us, half the time you won't know the purpose of your duties . . . and when we do explain, we might not be telling the truth. But that's the real world, folks . . .
— James Alan Gardner, Trapped
In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love.But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves.In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning.
— Marjorie Spock
[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
Touch paper only once.
— Robert Allen
Prayer not only teaches and strengthens one for work, work teaches and strengthens one for prayer.
— Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer
Winslow bounced over on the balls of his feet, clearly not experiencing any sort of crash. 'Aren't your guys nervous? I'm nervous as all hell.''There's nothing to be nervous about,' Beck said, joining them. 'Nerves are only useful when they can spur you on to work harder, faster, better. Once the work is done, they become pointless.
— Louisa Edwards, Too Hot To Touch
Travel wasn't fun if you didn't get to see or do what you wanted; it was merely a different type of work, in a different place.
— Chris Pavone, The Expats
Being by his faith replaced afresh in paradise and created anew, he (the believer)does not need works for his justification, but that he may not be idle, but that he may exercise his own body and preserve it. His works are to be done freely, with the sole object of pleasing God.
— Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty
We must primarily become seekers of God instead of founders of works, for work will not sustain us through the traumas of incarnation.
— Viv Grigg
Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.
— Jack London
Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn’t believe we were getting paid for this.
— Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
The main character, Gene Moore, is shown how much of his identity is wrapped up in his career and potential in that career. When he comes home from war no longer able to see himself as a baseball prospect, he isn't sure who he is. This is thoroughly reinforced every time one of his acquaintances identifies him by baseball or inquires about his status. How much of our identity and worth is wrapped up in our job title or the one we are aspiring to?
— Gary Moore, Playing With the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams
We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.
— Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring--this is one of the harshest human miseries.
— Wisława Szymborska
You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel—a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady
— H.G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes
From a pound of iron, that costs little, a thousand watch-springs can be made, whose value becomes prodigious. The pound you have received from the Lord,--use it faithfully.
— Robert Schumann
Is a PLONGEUR'S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is no luxury at all.
— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Oh, God! That bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!
— Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives
By means of industry and perseverance you will rise higher and higher.
— Robert Schumann
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.
— Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of enterprise does require workers to be consistent, predictable, precise, uniform, and even to a certain extent creative, it does not really require them to be persons, that is, to live examined lives, to grow, to develop character, to search for truth, to know themselves, etc.
— Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist
The human worker will go the way of the horse.
— Wassily Leontief
Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions
— Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Back in the days when gladiators hacked away at each other, there was always the man who decided whether the defeated should live or die. The job is usually given to the Emperor in movies, but in fact any senior man could have been the designated thumbs-up-thumbs-down guy. The official title for this fellow was...the editor. (evil laughter in background)
— Gary Corby
A doctor must work eighteen hours a day and seven days a week. If you cannot console yourself to this, get out of the profession.
— Martin H. Fischer
I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.
— Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table
And you’re stuck like a hook through the roof of your mouthTired of living for your sick daysEvery day makes you sickTired of living just get paidWhen you’re dying to livebut you can’t
— Dominic Owen Mallary
I faced the "dead lion" courageously but will definitely run if I meet a roaring one...
— Bahterawan, Menatah Makna
Normally I give permission to take my daughter for a walk after only the building of a wall and a stone pathway.' He smiled. 'For future reference.''But, Pan, I knew after the first week that a walk was not the only thing I would request,' the Pigeon said, smiling, 'and winter will be here soon.
— Brigid Pasulka, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True
What did you work at?” Colum asked, shifting a bit on the bench to look more directly at me.“I was in service,” I said quietly, more quietly than I intended. I wondered if maybe the answer had gotten lost in the rumble of the engines. It didn’t.“Honest work,” Colum said. I knew that that was what people say about work they consider beneath them. Hauling and scrubbing and digging are “honest work.” Grubbing and mucking? “Honest work.” Tell someone you’re a doctor or a mill owner, and they never say “honest work.
— Susan Lynn Peterson, Clare
A determined Yankee book drummer once told a Southerner that 'a set of books on scientific agriculture' would teach him to 'farm twice as good as you do.' To which the Southerner replied: 'Hell, son, I don't farm half as good as I know how now.
— Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South
I worked for a menial’s hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have willingly paid.
— Jessie B. Rittenhouse
...but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw form it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it)...
— John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
Anyone who can walk to the welfare office can walk to work. 
— Al Capp
Do you think people love having jobs, Sylvia asks Peter in  because they offer a condoned but false responsibility that masks, for at least eight hours a day, true responsibility?
— David Bajo
..it's not how much you work, but how working so much makes you feel that counts. And how I felt was iserable.
— Jonathon Lazear, The Man Who Mistook His Job for a Life: A Chronic Overachiever Finds the Way Home
My parents' work ethic amazed me. How could they put in such long hours, day after day?Part of the reason was to keep the family going - to keep me going. I realized that, although we had different values derived from different cultures and wouldn't agree on certain issues, they were good people, incredible people, and I loved and respected them.
— Harvey Pekar, The Quitter
The more completely you can be yourself, the more fully and consciously you participate in the world.
— Krist Pauwels, Your Work and Your Life: Towards a True Win-Win
No work is so important you have to do it.
— Marty Rubin
Of what use can our labour be, when the labours we record are in themselves entirely useless?
— Henry Dircks, Perpetuum Mobile: Or a History of the Search for Self-Motive Power from the 13th to the 19th Century
Don’t worry about getting credit, do the work anyway.
— Richie Norton
Entrepreneurs get distracted by productivity and miss profits.Corporate folk get distracted by efficiencies and miss effectiveness.But ballers? Ballers know the difference between a hack and a hoop every time.Take your shot.
— Richie Norton
What are you NOT working on that you should?
— Richie Norton
I earned a mater's degree in journalism and took the first job offered, as a sports writer. Instead of chasing my own fame, I wrote about famous athletes chasing theirs.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
I was cranked to a fifth gear, and everything I did, I did on a deadline.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
.. I thought about him now and then, the things he had taught me about 'being human' and 'relating to others;, but it was always in the distance, as if from another life.. .. The people who might have told me were long forgotten, their phone numbers buried in some packed-away box in the attic.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Anna thought about the men outside on the gallery. She was glad they were there; finding them smoking and talking quietly had been comforting, it was what men did in the evenings when the work was done. Of course, the work was not done, and she doubted that it ever would be. It would go on and on, even after the house was emptied of strangers, long after the wildflowers had blossomed a hundred times on their graves.
— Howard Bahr, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War
Work while you have strength.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Do all the work you can while you still have strength.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Arrogance never takes you anywhere. If you're arrogant and try to subvert your subordinates just remember time changes and you May not be in the position someday. They are younger and they will be in the power at that time.Power and position is never slave to someone, it moves with time.
— Himmilicious
...Think of it as 'Right Livelihood 2.0'... In addition to not causing harm to yourself or another, this is livelihood that is an expression of your Core Intention, work that you can fall in love with and that no longer feels like “work”: work that matters.
— Maia Duerr, Work That Matters: Create a Livelihood That Reflects Your Core Intention
Whatever your favorite kind of resistance is, it is likely to go into full bloom as you start making changes to your livelihood because this is an area that is linked with survival (our job is what pays our bills) as well as identity (our job is how we define ourselves). As a matter of fact, the more resistance you encounter, the more likely that you’re hitting paydirt in your transformational process.
— Maia Duerr, Work That Matters: Create a Livelihood That Reflects Your Core Intention
Mindfulness is an invitation to change that pattern and to become aware of where we are and how we got here. Mindfulness gives us a chance to listen to the wisdom of our hearts, to notice with more clarity where we get in our own way, and to shift from reacting out of habit to responding from our intentions.
— Maia Duerr, Work That Matters: Create a Livelihood That Reflects Your Core Intention
The practice of mindfulness is one of the most powerful reset buttons we have. When we learn how to slow down internally, we begin to see our habitual reactive patterns. We start to understand how fear, even on subtle levels, may dictate our choices around our work.
— Maia Duerr, Work That Matters: Create a Livelihood That Reflects Your Core Intention
You may want to sit with the following question: How much am I identifying with a job title rather than what I intuitively know is my work to share with the world?
— Maia Duerr, Work That Matters: Create a Livelihood That Reflects Your Core Intention
Do all the work you can, while there is grace of strength.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Thank God for the strength to work.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You can either go home with enough money or enough excuses, but not both!
— Harshvardhan Malpani
If you can't give it all you've got, don't bother.
— Joyce Rachelle
Work like playing a video game, we can't move to a higher level by skipping or being bad at lower levels, the lower levels are made easy to polish our skill sets & analytic skills, like a video game treat even the daily routine work as a preparation to be battle worthy for the tougher stages, never pick & chose the occasion or situation to perform better.
— Shahenshah Hafeez Khan
Early to bed and early to rise may make a person 'healthy' but it may not make him ‘wealthy’ and ‘wise’! If anyone really wants to be wealthy and wise, he must read books and work intelligently!
— Md. Ziaul Haque
O God give me enough grace for my daily work.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
My feeling about work is that it's an unnecessary evil, so I've always done my best to avoid it.
— Marty Rubin
The comeback need to always be more effective than the downfall!
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett