c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.
— Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
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.
— Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
Its hard to stay up. Its been a long long dayAnd you've got the sandman at your door. But hang on, leave the TV on and lets do it anyway.Its ok. You can always sleep through work tomorrow. Ok?Hey, Hey, Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.Tell the clock on the wall, "Forget the wake up call."Cause the night's not nearly through.Wipe the sleep from your eyes. Give yourself a surprise.Let your worries wait another day.And if you stay too late at the bar,At least you made it out this far. So make up your mind and say, "Let's do it anyway!"Its OkYou can always sleep through work tomorrow, ok? Hey, Hey, Tomorrow's just your future yesterday. Life's too short to worry about the things that you can live withoutAnd I regret to say, the morning light is hours away.The world can be such a fright, But it belongs to us tonight.What's the point of going to bed?You look so lovely when your eyes are red.Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.
— Craig Ferguson
Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.
— Curtis Sittenfeld, The Man of My Dreams
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.
— Steve Jobs
When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
— Thomas Merton
It is quality rather than quantity that matters.
— Seneca
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
— Gustave Flaubert
The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
— Eric Hoffer
I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
— Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Whatever you make, base it upon that which is most important to you. Only then will it have depth and meaning, and only then will it resonate with others.
— Christopher Paolini, Eldest
Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.
— Honoré de Balzac
What I've learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you're giving them what they want. They'll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you're going your job well, but the minute you're not, you're fucked. They'll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.
— Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.
— Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job
—  it takes a wise man to make it without working.
But to believe that getting stuff is the purpose and aim of life is madness. 
— Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
— Alasdair Gray
Instead of communicating "I love you, so let me make life easy for you," I decided that my message needed to be something more along these lines: "I love you. I believe in you. I know what you're capable of. So I'm going to make you work.
— Kay Wills Wyma, Cleaning House: A Mom's Twelve-Month Experiment to Rid Her Home of Youth Entitlement
So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed.The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.
— Carl Sandburg
In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present - I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.
— Robert Rodríguez, Rebel Without a Crew, or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?
— Don Marquis
When you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,And what is it to work with love?It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.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 charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit.Work is love made visible
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!
— Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters
Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do, which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers. 
— Thomas S. Monson, Pathways To Perfection: Discourses Of Thomas S. Monson
I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.
— Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make them real. 
— Robert Fanney
you should first follow the plow if you want to dance the harvest jig.
— Ken Follett, World Without End
Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.
— Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes
‎A change of work is the best rest.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from
— Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
No matter how much pressure you feel at work, if you could find ways to relax for at least five minutes every hour, you’d be more productive.
— Joyce Brothers
Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
— Voltaire, Candide
After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.
— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Anything is better than stagnation.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
There is no pleasure in having nothing to do
—  the fun is having lots to do and not doing it.
Don’t worry, I’m not quitting. I’ve decided I’m going to stay andmake his life a living hell while I run his business into the ground.--Kim to Abe
— Devon Rhodes, Silver and Gold
If I'm working this hard in the morning, I'd prefer it be because my man has woken me up with an eight-inch nudge.
— Erin McCarthy, Hard and Fast
We spent our lives making livings.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
If you're not inthe mood, you can't do that stuff right.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.(pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Daja: "He and Rosethorn work together? They hate each other." Lark: "I didn't say they liked it.- Daja and Lark referring to Rosethorn and Crane's cooperation on finding the cures for new diseases
— Tamora Pierce, Briar's Book
Llarimar had told him to do his best. That sounded like an awful lot of work. Unfortunately, doing nothing was beginning to seem like even MORE work.
— Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker
This could be a whole life," she thought. "You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this...
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
There is more to life than making a living. Do not work more than you live.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.
— Scott Dikkers, You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day
work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.
— Gordon B. Hinckley
Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
— Mark Twain
I love my job when I'm not there.
— Paul R. Linde, Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist
If this country is ever demoralized, it will come from trying to live without work.
— Abraham Lincoln
Be like a duck, paddling and working very hard inside the water, but what everyone sees is a smiling and calm face.
— Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom
Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.
— Jeff Lindsay, Dexter Is Delicious
If you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.
— Ogden Nash, Hard Lines
The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.
— Robert Frost
When people say the word "convention," they are usually referring to large gatherings of the employees of companies and corporations who attend a mass assembly, usually in a big hotel somewhere, for the purpose of pretending to learn stuff when they are in fact enjoying a free trip somewhere, time off work, and the opportunity to flirt with strangers, drink, and otherwise indulge themselves. The first major difference between a business convention and a fan-dom convention is that fandom doesn’t bother with the pretenses. They’re just there to have a good time. The second difference is the dress code— the ensembles at a fan convention tend to be considerably more novel.
— Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty
If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.
— J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.
— Benedict Cumberbatch
Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn't know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.
— B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.
— Albert Einstein
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
— Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
In his opinion, working was vastly overrated. Particularly as a way to build character, for everyone who engaged in it was far too snappish and fussy, and seemed to have no manners at all.
— Hilari Bell, Crown of Earth
A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.
— Anne Taylor Fleming
In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.
— Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle
Work diligently. Work hard. Focus. Perform as if you are at the Olympics. One day, unexpectedly, it will start paying off.
— Joan Marques
We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
— Marshall McLuhan
It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.
— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.
— Anne Wilson Schaef
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
— Hilaire Belloc
He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like "core values" at him with impunity. 
— Terry Pratchett, Making Money
You did what you were told or you didn't get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn't your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn't your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care.
— Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
— George Bernard Shaw
Only super-efforts count.
— G.I. Gurdjieff
Doing nothing is the hardest torture that a person can put himself through. For he is always brought face to face with his own self, which demands that he gives account for the sun which he uselessly squanders, for the springs of energy in his organism, the gold of wisdom in the mines of his brains. The masses work, slog, forget. They drink the alcohol of their sweat. Work is a flight from responsibility and God. Since the mystic beliefs have been banned from Europe, pillars of glory have been erected to rationality in order to put something in place of the cross: the French Revolution named its goddess reason, the Russians named their Moloch work. But the machine called Europe is running idle: it fills stomachs with fake bread, builds artificial houses with iron paper, the products are bad, the pay meager, and at the end of the six holy work days is the unholy Sunday which one sleeps through out of fear of the great boredom which is infecting Europe. Sunday, the day of idleness, is nowadays a punishment for Christianity, the cities collapse into soulless ruins, nature is just a backdrop for dusty sports. Doing nothing out of principle, my dear, is nowadays the most violent form of revolt.
— Iwan Goll
Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a 'cathedral' for worship of knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged.
— Tony Attwood, The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome
My job is to scream cockle-doodle-doo. Don't blame me if the sun doesn't rise.
— Janet Skeslien Charles, Moonlight in Odessa
It [money] doesn't have anything have anything to do with the magnificence of a person. It doesn't. What matters is what you make. Whether it's a cake for bingo night or a costume for a saint or a wall of water--whatever you pour into this life is what makes you rich.
— Adriana Trigiani, Rococo
Everyone, no matter what kind of job he or she has, fantasizes about freaking out at work. How many corporate drones, stuck in a boring staff meeting, have had the sudden urge to jump on top of the conference table and start screaming obscenities? Strip off their clothes? Kiss the woman or man next to them? We all have. How many employees joke about shooting the boss or blowing the place up? I’m not suggesting we do any of these things, mind you, but let’s not kid ourselves; we all have a little murder in our heart.
— Steve Dublanica, Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip-Confessions of a Cynical Waiter
If you can work anywhere, anytime, then pretty soon you're working everywhere all the time.
— Judy Nichols, Tree Huggers
I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.
— Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
I now have anti-bodies to assholes after working for so many.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading
You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them.
— L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz
Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
— Paul Hawken
Cat, I'll let you in on a little secret. We don't all love our jobs every day. And doing something you have passion for doesn't make the work part of it any easier...It just makes you less likely to quit.
— Kate Jacobs, The Friday Night Knitting Club
There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.
— Alan Cohen
Learn to do common things uncommonly well
—  we must always keep in mind that anything that helps full the dinner pail is valuable.
Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him.
— Benjamin Franklin
Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it's not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.
— David    Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.
— George Lois
Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
— H.L. Mencken
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
— George Santayana
Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair.
— David Livingstone
The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.
— Richard Bach
Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.
— Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him - why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also.
— Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
But maybe it’s the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?
— Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
Murderers don't get forgiven just because we promise to be good from now on. We have to earn our way back. One hundred is the price. One hundred lives for each we took. That seems fair. That's how we get whole again and that's our work, from now until as long as it takes.
— Bill Willingham, Fables, Vol. 18: Cubs in Toyland
Teach all men to fish, but first teach all men to be fair. Take less, give more. Give more of yourself, take less from the world. Nobody owes you anything, you owe the world everything.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Some managers hire people they're excited to work with. I prefer to hire people I'm excited to dominate.
— Mykle Hansen, HELP!  A Bear is Eating Me!
One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America -- and at least double that number with a conscience. Hard as they try, they simply can't turn their heads away from an injustice when they see one taking place.
— Michael Moore, Here Comes Trouble
A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.
— Michael R. LeGault
I had the most boring office job in the world...I used to clean the windows on envelopes.
— Rita Rudner
What is hard work? It takes strength, energy, and stress to truly care about others enough to place oneself last, but it is easy to wrap oneself up and selfishly scramble on the heads of others.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is—I wouldn’t give twopence for him’— here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers— ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
...treasure what it means to do a day's work. It's our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it's certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you'll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.
— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs--jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.
— Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
I hold a little fundraiser every day. Its called going to work.
— Stephen Colbert
I often think how unadventurous my life must seem from the outside, though I do like my job.
— Mary Hoffman, City of Flowers
Hard work should be rewarded by good food.
— Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
The world, and therefore the workplace, is full of idiots. And the reality of life is that when you get rid of one idiot, another will show up to take his place. It's the curse of humanity.
— Larry Winget, It's Called Work For a Reason
..The stuff you learn beforehand will never be one-tenth as useful as the stuff you learn the hard way, on the job.
— Hugh MacLeod, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination
I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you.
— Mary Karr, Lit
The only way to make a spoilt machine work again is to break it down, work on its inner system and fix it again. Screw out the bolts of your life, examine and work on yourself, fix your life again and get going.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Prayer will never do our work for us
—  what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.
The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts
There's nothing like active employment, I suppose, to console the afflicted.
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation.
— Helen Nearing, The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living
It is beyond a doubt that everyone should have time for some special delight, if only five minutes each day to seek out a lovely flower or cloud or star, or learn a verse to brighten another’s dull task. What is the use of such terrible diligence as many tire themselves out with, if they always postpone their exchanges of smiles with Beauty and Joy to cling to irksome duties and relations?
— Helen Keller, The Open Door
Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.
— John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism
Work like hell, tell everyone everything you know, close a deal with a handshake, and have fun.
— Harold Eugene Edgerton
Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didn’t want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didn’t feel so good today.
— Rollo Romig
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
I never realizedtill nowhow hard the brain has to workto make the body do what it asks.Or maybe how hard the body has to workto ignorethe brain.
— Thalia Chaltas, Because I Am Furniture
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play
— John Cleese
You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.
— Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us
I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen' 'You make it sound so simple.''It is simple,' he said. 'The thing is, it's also a lot of hard work. And people don't want to put in a lot of work.
— Jojo Moyes, Me Before You
What do dogs do on their day off?
—  Can't lie around – that's their job!
So what's your doll's name?" Boo asked me."Barbie," I said. "All their names are Barbie.""I see," she said. "Well, I'd think that would get boring, everyone having the samename."I thought about this, then said, "Okay, then her name is Sabrina.""Well, that's a very nice name," Boo said. I remember she was baking bread,kneading the doughbetween her thick fingers. "What does she do?""Do?" I said."Yes." She flipped the dough over and started in on it from the other side. "Whatdoes she do?""She goes out with Ken," I said."And what else?""She goes to parties," I said slowly. "And shopping.""Oh," Boo said, nodding."She can't work?""She doesn't have to work," I said."Why not?""Because she's Barbie.""I hate to tell you, Caitlin, but somebody has to make payments on that town houseand the Corvette,"Boo said cheerfully. "Unless Barbie has a lot of family money."I considered this while I put on Ken's pants.Boo started pushing the dough into a pan, smoothing it with her hand over the top."You know what Ithink, Caitlin?" Her voice was soft and nice, the way she always spoke to me."What?""I think your Barbie can go shopping, and go out with Ken, and also have aproductive and satisfyingcareer of her own." She opened the oven and slid in the bread pan, adjusting itsposition on the rack."But what can she do?" My mother didn't work and spent her time cleaning thehouse and going to PTA.I couldn't imagine Barbie, whose most casual outfit had sequins and go-go boots,doing s.uch things.Boo came over and plopped right down beside me. I always rememberher being on my level; she'd siton the edge of the sandbox, or lie across her bed with me and Cass as we listened tothe radio."Well," she said thoughtfully, picking up Ken and examining his perfect physique."What do you want todo when you grow up?"I remember this moment so well; I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross-legged, holding myKen and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother'sPTA and Boo'sstrange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina,and led right to me."Well," I said abruptly, "I want to be in advertising." I have no idea where this camefrom."Advertising," Boo repeated, nodding. "Okay. Advertising it is. So Sabrina has to goto work every day,coming up with ideas for commercialsand things like that.""She works in an office," I went on. "Sometimes she has to work late.""Sure she does," Boo said. "It's hard to get ahead. Even if you're Barbie.""Because she wants to get promoted," I added. "So she can pay off the town house.And the Corvette.""Very responsible of her," Boo said."Can she be divorced?" I asked. "And famous for her commercialsand ideas?""She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckledface so solemn, as ifshe knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.
— Sarah Dessen, Dreamland
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
— Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
— André Breton
Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?""Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside.
— Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
As long as you're in the food business, why not make sweets?
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.
— Henry James, Roderick Hudson
- Is it their fault if they think that it’s good to work?- No, said Colin, it’s not their fault. It’s because they’ve been told : work is sacred, it’s good, it’s nice, it’s what counts before anything, and only those who work have the right to everything. The only thing is, it’s been set up so that they work all the time so they can’t take advantage of it.- But then they’re stupid, said Chloe.- Yes, they’re stupid, said Colin. That’s why they agree with those that made them believe that work is the best thing there is. That saves them from thinking and finding a way to progress and to no longer work.
— Boris Vian, L'Écume des jours
Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.
— Joe Frazier
The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.
— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
The best incentive for an artist are the harshest criticism
— Válgame, Zori 2ª Parte
Work is the greatest thing in the world. So we should save some of it for tomorrow.
— Don Herold
Face it: as much as you’d like to be, you’re not perfect. Mistakes will be made in both your freelance career and life. Instead of fearing mistakes, remind yourself that there’s plenty to learn from them. If nothing else, you’ll learn that a mistake doesn’t mean the end of the world. In fact, it might be the beginning of a new one.
— Michael Law
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
— Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays
Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
— Karl Marx
People LOVE change (when it's about changing others). People HATE change (when it's about changing themselves).
— Richie Norton
Work is a blessing when it helps us to think about what we are doing
—  but it becomes a curse when its sole use is to stop us thinking about the meaning of life.
So, let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look over not only ourselves, but each other.
— Barack Obama
The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.
— Phil Jackson
Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
— Leonardo da Vinci
Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.
— John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Go on with your work as usual, for work is a blessed solace.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. (pg.132, The Body and the Earth)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray." (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.
— Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
— G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito Almanza declares: ‘I am convinced that all of photography depends on the moment we press the release […] I believe that you’re a photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.’ In making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: ‘[…] sometimes I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn’t begin in the dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger.
— Clive Scott, Spoken Image: Photography and Language
Do what you want that works.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,To lie flat and know nothing and be still,Are the two trades of man; and which is worseI know not, but I know that both are ill.
— A.E. Housman, More Poems
The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.
— Núria Añó
Lucian's father had warned him to fear idle men. Without the pride gained from a good day's work, they were left to their vices and the doubts that crowded their head. Their hatred. Their envy.
— Melina Marchetta, Quintana of Charyn
If you expect great things of yourself and demand little of others, you’ll keep resentment far away.
— Confucius, The Analects
If you want an incredibly passionate, happy, ALIVE business…don’t overcomplicate things. Once all is said and done, the foundational elements of a successful business are very simple: respect, service, value and sales. Comparatively, everything else is froth.
— Richie Norton
The employed are punished by having to do what they do not love. The self-employed are punished by the opposite.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There are plenty of people dragging themselves miserably through the world, because they are clogged and fettered with work for which they have no fitness... I can't help believing that nothing is better than to find one's work early and hold fast to it, and put all one's heart into it.
— Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor
I once met a woman who'd been in therapy... and it seemed like the big thing she'd learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. That's when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. There's a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if you've got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time you've finished it the day has begun ands you're onto the next thing. You're over the hump, like I said.
— Michael Marshall Smith
I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good........An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality
—  when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.