quotations about work
Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.
MORTIMER ADLER
A Vision of the Future: Twelve Ideas for a Better Life and a Better Society
Have you beheld a man skillful in his work? Before kings is where he will station himself; he will not station himself before commonplace men.
SOLOMON
Proverbs 22:29
Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
The Writing Life
It is useless work that darkens the heart.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
If every man should work at that for which nature fitted him, the cows would be well tended.
FLORIAN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction -- a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
Inter-cubicle friendship is every bit as good for your health and your output as an ergonomically correct ball chair. Even in our furiously multi-tasking world, work should still come with a good dose of play. And, okay, maybe some free pretzels too.
KATIE UNDERWOOD
"Why developing friendships at work is so important", Canadian Business, January 27, 2016
Playing games at work is a time-honored tradition. Windows computers come with Minesweeper and Solitaire for a reason, you know. But getting caught by the boss slacking off on company time isn't terribly good for your paycheck. If you're gaming on the clock, you need to be playing something that lets you cover your tracks.
K. THOR JENSEN
"The best games to secretly play at work", Geek, February 5, 2016
The truth is, any of us in a position to choose and chase work out of love do so from a place of relative privilege. Overwhelmingly, work in the world is done for income, and income alone, and love doesn't even get a look-in.
SIMON CASTLES
"Do what you love mantra devalues hard work", The Age, February 9, 2016
What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.
KARL MARX
Value, Price, and Profit
Call no work low that is honest;
Honest toil never degrades.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Workers"
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
CESARE PAVESE
The Business of Living
The chances of a man's succeeding who does not love his work are very small. For all success costs labor.
FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP
Success: A Course in Moral Instruction
Nothing will work unless you do.
MAYA ANGELOU
Facebook post, January 2, 2014
A woman's work is never done.
ENGLISH PROVERB
It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
letter to Harrison Blake, November 16, 1857
After forty years of close acquaintance with it, I've found that work is kind to its friends and harsh to its enemies. It pays the fellow who dislikes it his exact wages, and they're generally pretty small; but it gives the man who shines up to it all the money he wants and throws in a heap of fun and satisfaction for good measure.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
When the toiler bends and labors till his sweat turns into pearls,
'Tis a nobler decoration than the coronets of earls.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Caelestis"
Our salvation is in work, but let us also take delight in that work.
MAXIM GORKY
Untimely Thoughts
True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.
HERMAN MELVILLE
letter to Catherine G. Lansing, September 5, 1877