Qoutes about work

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

Anatole France (1844 - 1924), The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 5
It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies.

Bette Davis (1908 - 1989), The Lonely Life, 1962
Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

David McCullough (1933 - )
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'

Don Marquis (1878 - 1937)
A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957)
Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?

Edgar Bergen (1903 - 1978), (Charlie McCarthy)
Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.

Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)
Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861)
Getting fired is nature's way to telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place.

Hal Lancaster, in The Wall Street Journal
Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954)
Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.

Henry J. Kaiser (1882 - 1967)
Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

Horace (65 BC - 8 BC), Satires
People forget how fast you did a job - but they remember how well you did it.

Howard Newton
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

James M. Barrie (1860 - 1937)
By the work one knows the workmen.

Jean De La Fontaine (1621 - 1695)
...in order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.

John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

John Ruskin (1819 - 1900), Pre-Raphaelitism, 1850
Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.

Johnny Carson (1925 - 2005)
My work is a game, a very serious game.

M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 1976
It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990
People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.

Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971)
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005)
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

Richard Bach
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

Robert Benchley (1889 - 1945)