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.

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain.

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

Housekeeping ain't no joke.

I believe that it is as much a right and duty for women to do something with their lives as for men and we are not going to be satisfied with such frivolous parts as you give us.

We want rights. The flour merchant, the house-builder, and the postman charge us no less on account of our sex; but when we endeavor to earn money to pay all these, then, indeed, we find the interest.

How to succeed? Try hard enough.

If you have a job without any aggravations, you don't have a job.

Pay your people the least possible and you'll get from them the same.

The biggest mistake people make in life is not trying to make a living at doing what they most enjoy.

There is never enough time, unless you're serving it.

There's no way to move without making waves.

Gardening is not a rational act.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

If you're successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you're unsuccessful it's worse than having a skin disease.

Would people applaud me if I was a good plumber?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then get up. This is no time for sloth.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Nothing will work unless you do.

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.

I feel guilty just sitting around when I know I can be doing something.

An OBE is what you get if you clean the toilets well at King's Cross station.

I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.

I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

I'm a country boy. I hate New York. But that's where things happen, so I use it as a base for stories, I know enough about it. But I have to keep going back there.

Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

I would say I'd rather dig a ditch, you know, do hard, manual labor than write lyrics.

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.

I took a fortnight off. But I'm not a great believer in breaks. I don't want to be rattling around inside my own head. I did feel I was spiralling into a Kathy Burke character and tried going out, but I prefer it here. Filming keeps me busy. It absorbs me.

Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.

The coolest thing I've gotten to do in the past few years is guest star on Sesame Street.

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.

[It] was written and sold. I knew it was a strong story because I cared about it and believed in it. I had no idea that it would have the effect it had on the audience. While most people ignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives without reading it or anything else by me, there was still a surprisingly large group who responded to the story with some fervency.

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]

Make the workmanship surpass the materials.