1,881 Work Quotes

We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

Thank God, I have my work, but instead of earning money by it, I need money to be able to work; that is the difficulty. I think there are no signs in my work that indicate that I shall fail. And I am not a person who works slowly or tamely. Drawing becomes a passion with me, and I throw myself into it more and more. I do not have great plans for the future; if for a moment I feel rising within me the desire for a life without care, for prosperity, each time I go fondly back to the trouble and the cares, to a life full of hardship, and think: It is better so; I learn more from it, and make progress. This is not the road on which one perishes. I only hope the trouble and the cares will not become unbearable, and I have confidence I shall succeed in earning enough to keep myself, not in luxury, but as one who eats his bread in the sweat of his brow.

When we are working at a difficult task and strive after a good thing, we are fighting a righteous battle, the direct reward of which is that we are kept from much evil. As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.

By working hard, old man, I hope to make something good one day. I haven't yet, but I am pursuing it and fighting for it.

It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill- it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Dreams grow holy put in action; work grows fair through starry dreaming, But where each flows on unmingling, both are fruitless and in vain.

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.

I despise the comic industry, but I will always love the comic medium.

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

I have also considered many scientific plans during my pushing you around in your pram!

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to.

I'm still a shy person. I've learned to put that aside on certain occasions. I have to. It's part of my job.

Well, I think that a lot of times when you're working on a film, there aren't really opportunities to get to know all the people you have to work with.

I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine.

My work comes first, reasons for it follow.

Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible.

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.

I would recommend all men in choosing a profession to avoid any that may require an apology at every turn; either an apology or else a somewhat violent assertion of right.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

I must say I am not pleased to have to arrange the Senate schedule around the availability of Senators who are running for President.

There is a great Field-Marshal, my friend, who arrays our battalions; Let us to Providence trust, and abide and work in our stations.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'

'I don't want to do anything that I'm not passionate about.'

The truth is, one can work for another ten years and be playing parts, pushing yourself as hard as you can, and you are still accused of that. You're still tainted with that brush. I'm not called Jude Law, I have three names; I'm called 'Hunk Jude Law' or 'Heartthrob Jude Law'. In England anyway, that's my full name. That's the cheap language that's thrown around, that sums you up in one little bracket. It doesn't look at your life. But if one looks beyond, there is actually a little bit more.'

'I only want to do the kind of work that I would like to go and see, that's going to teach me something new, that involves working with people I can learn something from and I can give something to.'

'[The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection [...] If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [Dichter], but never a perfected, a truly great man.'

All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.

The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.

I love what I do and I don't want to stop - This is all I've ever wanted.

A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.

The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children's school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality...

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.

My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.

If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.

My work is the only ground I've ever had to stand on. I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation - but I'm working on the foundation.

'I am in so many movies that are on TV at 2:00 a.m. that people think I am dead.'

I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

'A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.'

The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes non-work.

Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.

I feel really privileged to be an actor, to be paid to do something I love.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

I writhe when I see myself on the screen. I'm such a dreadfully clumsy hulking image. I say to myself, 'Why doesn't he get off? Why doesn't he get off?' I mean, I look like such an idiot. Some fat awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company. I must stop thinking about it, otherwise I shan't be able to go on working.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew, The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Hitch your wagon to a star.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad - and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time- And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. ... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Carpe per diem: Seize the check.

There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.

The progress of society is mainly ... the improvement in the condition of the workingmen of the world.

I grieve for you, how I mourn for you, who are so very dear to me, but again I can rejoice within my heart, not for nothing 'have I labored,' neither has my exile been 'in vain.'

The harder I work the luckier I get.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul.

Is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight?

There never was a man on Earth who pitched as much as me. But the more I pitched, the stronger my arm would get.

You might think the word 'homemade' is just a word we use as a marketing ploy. But what you don't realize is that the staff sleeps here at night. If your tablecloth is wrinkled, that's why.

If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?

I don't sit around complaining about the lack of good roles. I will play Raj 85 times and still make him different.

'I work like a retailer. I sell my services, take my money and keep it in the bank.'

I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

People come up to me and say 'Steve, what is film editing?' And I say 'How should I know? You're the director.'

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it...