Quotes

Work: something that is or was done; what a person does or did, an act, deed, proceeding, business.
– Oxford English Dictionary

Vocation: the function or career toward which one believes himself to be called.
– New World Dictionary

Light is the task when many share the toil.
– Homer

Take this job and shove it.
– Johnnie Paycheck

I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.
– Sherlock Holmes

A true calling reveals its presence by the enjoyment and sense of renewed energies its practice yields us.
– Michael Novak

May all your labors be in vein.
– Miners= Toast

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
– Alvin Toffler

There’s a big difference between working at the same place and working together.
– Air Tran Annual Report

Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

I like my job and am good at it, but it sure grinds me down sometimes, and the last thing I need to take home is a headache.
– TV commercial for Anacin

Kill my boss?  Do I dare live out the American dream?
– Homer Simpson

If you really want something in life you have to work for it. Now quiet, they’re about to announce the lottery numbers.
– Homer Simpson

If adults don’t like their jobs, they don’t go on strike. They just go in every day and do it really half-assed.
– Homer Simpson

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.
– James Thurber

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
– Booker T. Washington

The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what the man or woman is able to do.
– Booker T. Washington

The more one works, the more willing one is to work.
– Lord Chesterfield

A man works from sun to sun.  A woman’s work is never done.
– American saying

If our offices are our new neighborhoods if our professional titles are our new ethnic tags, then how do we separate ourselves from our jobs? Self-worth isn’t just something to measure in the marketplace.  But in these new communities, it becomes harder and harder to tell who we are without saying what we do.
– Ellen Goodman

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.
– Anne Frank

If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in winter.
– Aesop’s Fable (ant to grasshopper)

Without work, all life goes rotten.  But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
– Albert Camus

We labor soon, we labor late, To feed the titled knave, man; And the comfort we’re to get Is that ayont the grave, man.
– Robert Burns

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
– Samuel Butler

The monastic life is no more a state of perfection than the life of a farmer or artisan.  All men, whatever their calling, ought to seek perfection in their calling.
– Martin Luther

But till we are built like angels – with hammer and chisel and pen, We will work for ourself and a woman, forever and ever, amen.
– Rudyard Kipling

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him; there is always work, and tools to work withal, for those who will.
– J .R.  Lowell

It is work which gives flavor to life.
– Amiel

Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.
– Hesiod

Be all that you can be.
– Army recruiting commercial

You find something to do that makes you feel good about yourself.  You are really miles ahead of most people.
– Army recruiting commercial

The spear, the net, the plow, the loom and many other technologies served to give the ancient cultures their surviving strength.  Today’s technology liberating the human spirit from the oppression of ancient labors is servant, not master, of our enduring beliefs.
– W.H. Krome George

Work bears witness who does well.
– John Ray

A day’s work is a day’s work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day’s sustenance, a night’s repose, and due leisure, whether he be a painter or ploughman.
– George Bernard Shaw

When I was young I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work.
– George Bernard Shaw

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a work of man.
– Mary McCarthy

The enlightened employer devotes its time, effort, money and other valuable resources toward the goal of assisting each and every person within the company to attain his or her highest possible level of achievement.
– Joe H. Clark

A good supervisor is not one who can outwork ten employees, but instead, a supervisor who can convince ten employees to outwork him.
– Joe H. Clark

Babe Ruth struck out 1330 times.
– Unknown

He that will not labour must not eat.
– Thomas Draxe

Though this is a fable, the moral is good: If you live without work, you must live without food.
– Unknown

There is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.
– Walt Whitman

If you work for yourself you do it for your own amusement, which is all right; if you work for others, you reap nothing but ingratitude.
– Guy De Maupassant

In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing, let this thought be present: AI am rising to a man’s work.
– Marcus Aurelius

Be satisfied with your business, and learn to love what you were bred to.
– Marcus Aurelius

Work is the sustenance of noble minds.
– Seneca

Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.
– Eric Hoffer

A piece of work So bravely done, so rich, that it did strive In workmanship and value.
– William Shakespeare

If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work.
– William Shakespeare

Leave no rubs or nor botches in the work.
– William Shakespeare

Great is work which lends dignity to men.
– Babylonian Talmud

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul and good for either the work of the other.
– Henry David Thoreau

The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.
– Henry David Thoreau

A man does not live to work, he works to live.
– Karl Barth

Man is destined for work and called to it.
– John Paul II

Unemployment affects, from the material and physical to the mental and spiritual.  It therefore very much concerns the church.
– John Paul II

All creatures are the work of God’s hands.  And so are human beings.  The command God gives us is to have dominion over the objects of creation, the things which God has made.  The responsibility he gives us is to produce useful things, things which have meaning in themselves and real values.  Meaningful work is creating as God creates.
– C. Benton Kline, Jr.

Not all men are called to a specialized or professional job; even fewer to the heights of genius in the arts and sciences; many are called to be laborers in factories, fields, and streets.  But no work is insignificant.
– Martin Luther King Jr.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hard toil can roughen form and face, And want can quench the eye’s bright grace.
– Walter Scott

Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Measure not the work until the day’s out and the labor done.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing.  It is the everlasting right of man.
– Thomas Carlyle

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
– Thomas Carlyle

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.
– Thomas Carlyle

Work is a grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind–honest work which you intend getting done.
– Thomas Carlyle

Blessed is he who has his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
– Thomas Carlyle

The best worship, however, is stout working.
– Thomas Carlyle

I am glad that the eight-hour day had not been invented when I was a young man. If my life had been made up of eight-hour days, I do not believe I could have accomplished a great deal.
– Thomas Edison

There is no substitute for hard work.
– Thomas Edison

I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.
– Thomas Edison

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
– Thomas Edison

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
– Thomas Edison

There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something!
– Thomas Edison

His genius he was quite content. In one brief sentence to define: Of inspiration one percent, Of perspiration, ninety-nine.
– Thomas Edison

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
– William Faulkner

A man cannot eat for 8 hours a day, cannot sleep for 8 hours, cannot make sex for 8 hours; the only thing a man can do for 8 hours is work.
– William Faulkner

Hard work is the best investment a man can make.
– C. M. Schwab

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

AThe gods sell us all good things for hard work.
– Epicharmus

A Our best friend is ever work.
– Collin D=Harleville

Any man with nothing to do has a hard job.
– American Proverb

ASoft jobs make soft people.
– American Proverb

The hardest job is no job.
– American Proverb

AThe fellow who doesn=t need a boss is often selected to be one.
– American Proverb

Doing nothing is the most tiresome job.
– American Proverb

The other fellows job is always easier.
– American Proverb

There may be luck in getting a good job, but there’s no luck in keeping it.
– American Proverb

All work is noble.
– American Proverb

Hard work is the best investment a man can make.
– American Proverb

Work is the only capital that never misses dividends.
– American Proverb

Your work expresses you more correctly than your tongue.
– American Proverb

I don’t want to do that B its too much like work
– American saying

If you intend to work, there is no better place than where you are; if you do not intend to work, you cannot get along anywhere.
– American Proverb

A man ain=t no bigger than the job it takes to give him a swell head.
– American Proverb

It’s a poor job that can’t afford one boss.
–  American Proverb

A job is an uncomfortable thing to be down on.
– American Proverb

Hard work conquers the worst of luck
– American Proverb

The fellow who works for a song has trouble meeting his notes.
– American Proverb

Work as if everything depended on you; pray as if everything depended on God.
– American Proverb

Work well done makes pleasure more fun.
– American Proverb

People who dream all night can=t work all day.
– American Proverb

Never look at half-done work.
– Scottish Proverb

It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Better to wear out than to rust out.
– Bishop Cumberland

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
– Genesis. 3:19

A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.
– Proverbs 10:4

“Do you see a man excellent in his work? He will serve before kings….”
– Proverbs 22:29

All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
– Ecclesiastes 1:8

The sleep of a laboring man is sweet.
– Ecclesiastes 5:12

If anyone will not work, he shall not eat.
– II Thess. 3:7

Man goes forth unto his work and to his labor until the evening.
– Psalms, 104:23

So guide us in the work we do, that we may do it not for the self alone, but for the common good.
– Episcopal Book of Common Prayer

Labor is the handmaid of religion.
– C.H. Parkhurst

It’s all in a day’s work.
– English saying

Work is a curse and nothing else.
– Ancient Greek saying

He that would eat the kernel must crack the shell.
– Titus Plautus

A ploughman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on his knees.
– Ben Franklin

Handle your tools without mittens.
– Ben Franklin

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
– Hilaire Belloc

Why do strong arms fatigue themselves with frivolous dumbbells? To dig a vineyard is a worthier exercise for men.
– Marcus Martial

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
– Saying

If you don’t like this job, don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass.
– Unknown supervisor

The road that brought you in here can also take you out of here.
– Unknown supervisor

It’s my way or the highway.
– Unknown supervisor

My job is to make your life miserable.
– Sign on supervisor’s desk

What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.
– Phyllis Diller

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of work because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
– Andy Warhol

Many hands make light work.
– William Patten.

Heaven is blessed with perfect rest but the blessing of earth is toil.
– Henry Van Dyke

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
– H.L. Mencken

A company cannot increase its productivity.  People can.
– Robert Half

Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.
– Radio Broadcast. (Addressing President Roosevelt.)

The worker feels himself at home only during his leisure hours, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed forced labor.  It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means of satisfying other needs.
– Karl Marx

Life’s race well run, Life’s work well done, Life’s victory won, Now comes rest.
– Edward Hazen Parker

An American workman will give equal attention simultaneously to three, four, or six machines or tools, while the British workman is compelled by his trade union to limit his attention to one, so that employment may be given to half a dozen men.
– Jack London

The woman stenographer or bookkeeper who receives forty dollars per month where a man was receiving seventy-five is a scab.  So is the woman who does a man=s work at a weaving machine, and the child who goes into the mill or factory.
– Jack London

We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.
– Artistotle

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
– Samuel Butler

Chose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
– Confucius

Work continues to be critically important in the self-identity of Americans, closely linked to the demand for self-reliance.  The problem is not so much the presence or absence of a work ethic as the meaning of work and ways it links or fails to link, individuals to one another.
– Robert N. Bellah

I am a strong believer that one of the most satisfying things in life is to create a highly moral and ethical environment in which every individual is allowed and encouraged to realize their God-given potential.  There are few things more satisfying than to see individuals reach levels of performance that they would have thought was virtually impossible for themselves.
– Kenneth Lay (In Business As A Calling)

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don’t happen to think it’s an appropriate subject for an ethic
– Barbara Ehrenreich

Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, Make me feel important.
– Mary Kay Ash

When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside us, the doors of our souls fly open and love steps forth to heal everything in sight.
– Michael Bridge

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
– Logan Pearsall Smith

Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self and it is a task no longer; it is joy; it is art.
– Bliss Carman

If a guy doesn’t look at business as a vocation, he=s not going to make it.  And the vocation changes as you grow.  For me, it was one thing at 30, another at 50 and at 60.  The one consistent thing — I loved challenges.
– Paul F. Orrifece (In Business As A Calling)

 I never worked a day in my life. It’s not work when you love what you’re doing.
– David Shakarian

 The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
– John Ruskin

The best work never was and never will be done for money.
– John Ruskin

 My father always told me, Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
– Jim Fox

Never tell people how to do things.  Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
– General George Patton

Clearly, the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
– John Kenneth Galbraith

Don’t be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.
– Brooks Atkinson

When work is a pleasure, life is joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
– Maxim Gorky

Your life work is a statement of Who You Are. If it is not, then why are you doing it? Do you imagine that you have to? You don’t have to do anything.
– “Conversations with God” ( Neale Donald Walsch)

The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they’re not going to succeed, saying: There is life, but it’s not for you.
– John Mortimer

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
– Sally Berger

Nothing is work unless you’d rather be doing something else.
– George Halas

Success isn’t permanent, and failure isn’t fatal.
– Mike Ditka

The will to succeed is important, but what’s even more important is the will to prepare.
– Bobby Knight

I don’t try to outwork anybody.  I’m not that insecure.  We work until the job gets done, then we go home to be with our families.
– Steve Spurrier

We don’t stay in the office until after midnight, but some people can do in fifteen minutes what others will spread over two hours.  When a coach says he works sixteen hours a day, it’s his security blanket.  Then when he loses, nobody can say he was outworked.
– Steve Spurrier

Making a success of the job at hand is the best step toward the kind you want.
– Bernard M. Baruch

Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.
– Elbert Hubbard

Any man who has a job has a chance.
– Elbert Hubbard

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
– Elbert Hubbard

People who never do any more than they get paid for, never get paid for any more than they do.
– Elbert Hubbard

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office every day. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
– W. H. Auden

There’s many a one who would be idle if hunger didn’t pinch him, but the stomach sets us to work.
– George Eliot

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object cannot live.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.
– Fyodor Dostoevski

Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare.
– Leo Tolstoy

The happiness of men consists in life.  And life is in labor.
– Leo Tolstoy

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.
– Victor Hugo

Good luck is a lazy man’s estimate of a worker’s success
– Unknown

I’ve had enough success for two lifetimes, My success is talent put together with hard work and luck.
– Kareem Abdul-Jabar

The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.
– Mark Twain

The law of work does seem utterly unfair, but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the workers gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also.
– Mark Twain

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
– Mark Twain

If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.”
– Michelangelo

Remember that you are needed. There is at least one important work to be done that will not be done unless you do it.”
– Charles L. Allen

Women can do any job men can and give birth while doing it.
– Allen Heavey

In the sweet old country where I come from nobody ever works, nothing gets done.”
– Mick Jagger

The fellow who doesn’t need a boss is often selected to be one.”
– Christopher Morley

The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be the one uniting all working people, of all nations, of all tongues and kindreds.
– Abraham Lincoln

My father taught me to work, but he did not teach me to love it.
– Abraham Lincoln

I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of the work, He would have made them with mouths only and no hands.
– Abraham Lincoln

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it=s a depression when you lose your own.
– Harry S. Truman

I studied the lives of great men and famous women, and I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.
– Harry S. Truman

In the Great Society, work shall be an outlet for man=s interests and desires. Each individual shall have full opportunity to use his capacities in employment which satisfies personally and contributes generally to the quality of the Nation’s life.
– Lyndon B. Johnson

No man needs sympathy because he has to work.  Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
– Theodore Roosevelt

The work ethic holds that labor is good in itself; that a man or woman becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working. America’s competitive spirit, the work ethic of this people, is alive and well on Labor Day, 1971.
– Richard M. Nixon

Honor lies in honest toil.
– Grover Cleveland

No man ever listened himself out of a job.
– Calvin Coolidge

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
– John Cleese

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
– Bette Davis

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
– Bette Davis

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve through not dying.
– Woody Allen

I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from doubt.
– Charles Horace Mayo

Don’t sacrifice your life to work and ideals. The most important things in life are human relations. I found that out too late.
– Katharine Susannah Prichard

Let us realize that the privilege to work is a gift, that power to work is a blessing, that love of work is success.
– David O. McKay

You can always find reasons to work. There will always be one more thing to do. But when people don’t take time out, they stop being productive. They stop being happy, and that affects the morale of everyone around them.
– Carisa Bianchi

The biggest mistake we could ever make in our lives is to think we work for anybody but ourselves.
– Brian Tracy

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.
– Unknown

Labor for labor’s sake is against nature.
– John Locke

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?
– Don Marquis

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.
– Henry Ward Beecher

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.
– Indira Gandhi

Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.
– Ted Turner

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
– J.M. Barrie

If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
– Albert Einstein

How do I work?  I grope.
– Albert Einstein

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
– Albert Schweitzer

Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
– W. Edwards Deming

I slip from workaholic to bum real easy.
– Matthew Broderick

The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.
– Unknown

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
– Richard Bach

To youth I have but three words of counsel: Work, work, work.
– Otto von Bismarck

“The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.”
– Robert Frost

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until get to the office.
– Robert Frost

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
– Robert Frost

People who work harder at their jobs than they have to are a little bit crazy
– Unknown

There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.
– Robert Woodruff

Do it my way or watch your butt.
– Raising Arizona (the movie)

A career is a job that has gone on too long.
– Jeff MacNelly

Tell your boss what you think of him, and the truth shall set you free
– Unknown

As a nation, we have developed a sense of the value of technology and of a scientific approach to it, but we have meanwhile taken people for granted.
– William G. Ouchi

The growing hunger for community offers new doorways for spirituality to enter and enrich our workplace.
– Jay Conger

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
– Jerome K. Jerome

Taste the joy that springs from labor.
– Henry Longfellow

His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whatever he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man.
– Henry Longfellow

One half of the world must sweat and groan that the other half may dream.
– Henry Longfellow

Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night’s repose.
– H .W. Longfellow

The laboring people are only poor because they are numerous.
– Edmund Burke

Work determines our status and shapes our social interaction.  Some people can hardly talk to a stranger without first knowing what he or she does for a living.
–  B. Ciulla

The flexible workplace can be a solution to the problems families face, or it can be the root of their problems.  We have gone from moving our homes into the organization or moving the organization into our homes.  It again raises the question of whether life should be part of work or work part of life.
– Joanne B. Ciulla

It’s easy to see why — aside from the income it provides — having a job is so desirable in our culture.   Work works for us.  It offers instant discipline, identity and worth. It structures our time and imposes a rhythm in or lives.
– Joanne B. Ciulla

“The trouble with unemployment is that you never get a day off.”
– Corrigan

“I am a great believer in luck and the harder I work the more I have of it.”
– Stephen Leacock

“Things that are bad for business are bad for the people who work for business.”
– Thomas Dewey

“Work is more fun than fun.”
– Noel Coward

“What counts is not the number of hours you put in, but how much you put in the hours.”
– Unknown

“I like to work half a day.  I don’t care if it’s the first twelve hours or the second twelve hours.  I just put in my half every day.  It keeps me out of trouble.”
– Kemmons Wilson

“Every man=s work is a portrait of himself.”
– Unknown

“Term, holidays, term holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.”
– C.S. Lewis

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
– C. Northcote Parkinson

“If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work on brass, time will efface it. If we rear temples, they will crumble to dust. But if we work on men’s immortal minds, if we impress on them high principles, the just fear of God, and love for their fellow-men, we engrave on those tablets something which no time can efface, and which will brighten and brighten to all eternity.”
– Daniel Webster

“I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man.”
– Alexander Hamilton

“Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell.”
– Beatrice Potter

“The real essence of work is concentrated energy, people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and active people are kept up to their labors.”
– Walter Bagehot

“Some who are not paid what they are worth ought to be glad.”
– Unknown

“The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
– Samuel Goldwyn

“An idea is not worth much until a man is found who has the energy and the ability to make it work.”
– Unknown

“Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”
– Philip Dormer Stanhope

“People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.”
– Ogden Nash

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog.  The man will be there to feed the dog.  The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
– Warren Bennis

 “Before you rob your first bank, knock off a couple of gas stations.”
– John Dillinger

“Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.”
– Samuel Johnson

“Too many people quit looking for work when they find a job.”
– Unknown

“We must believe in luck.  For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?”
– Jean Cocteau

“I encourage boldness because the danger of our seniority and pension plans tempt a young man to settle in a rut named security rather than find his own rainbow.”
– Conrad Hilton

“Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.”
– Christopher Lasch

“Behold the turtle: He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.”
– James Bryant Conant

“The trick is to make sure you don’t die waiting for prosperity to come.”
– Lee Iacocca

“I make progress by having people around who are smarter than I am and listening to them.  And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.”
– Henry J. Kaiser

“The door to the room of success swings on the hinges of opposition.”
– Unknown

“Strong lives are motivated by dynamic purposes; lesser ones exist on wishes and inclinations.  The most glowing successes are but reflections of an inner fire.”
– Kenneth Hildebrand

“A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.”
– Unknown

“A man can fail many times but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”
– Unknown

“I have no complex about wealth.  I have worked hard for my money, producing things people need.  I believe that the able industrial leader who creates wealth and employment is more worthy of historical notice than politicians or soldiers.”
– John Paul Getty

“The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.”
– John Steinbeck

“All the money in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t have time to enjoy it.”
– Oprah Winfrey

“Money is life.  Once upon a time freedom used to be life.  Now it’s money.”
– Lorraine Hansberry

“Early to bed, early to rise, work like a dog and advertise.”
– Melvin Van Peebles

“Work and love, these are the basics.  Without them there is neurosis.”
– Dr. Theodore Reik

“I think housework is the reason most women go to the office.”
– Heloise Cruse

“Your mental health will be better if you have lots of fun outside of that office.”
– Dr. William Menninger

“When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy but their personalities as well.  They sell by the week, or month, their smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must practice that prompt repression of resentment and aggression.”
– C. Wright Mills

“More free time means more time to waste.  The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk, beat his wife Band watch TV.”
– Robert Hutchins

“The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.”
– Eugene V. Debs

“Show me a country in which there are no strikes and I’ll show you that country in which there is no freedom.”
– Samuel Gompers

“Anybody who has any doubt about the ingenuity or the resourcefulness of a plumber never got a bill from one.”
– George Meany

“If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.”
– Lane Kirkland

“No tin-hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or Bible-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation-paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor.”
– John L. Lewis

“Samuel Gompers spent his life trying to keep Labor from working too hard, and he certainly succeeded beyond his own dreams.”
– Will Rogers

“Labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth because they take away a man=s independence.”
– Henry Ford

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”
– Henry Ford

“Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.”
– Winston Churchill

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
– Winston Churchill

“People don’t look for kinds of work anymore, ma’am, he answered impassively.  They just look for work.”
– Ayn Rand

“If you leave your work for one day, you’ll be out of practice for three.”
– Chinese proverb

“Those who work their minds rule; those who work with their backs are ruled.”
– Chinese proverb

“To do his work well a workman must first sharpen his tools.”
– Chinese proverb

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one=s work is terribly important.”
– Bertrand Russell

“We must be dreamers and doers who can help make the dream of a better life possible for tens of thousands of workers and their families in all disciplines.”
– Union Organizer

“The grapevine is the most effective, but unreliable mode of communications in the workplace.”
– A. McArthur Irvin

“An employer who fails to manage change will soon be involved in managing discontent.”
– A. McArthur Irvin

“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.”
– Oscar Wilde

“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.”
– Oscar Wilde

“As long as you=re going to be thinking anyway, think big.”
– Donald Trump

“You’re fired.”
– Donald Trump

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”
– Peter Drucker

“Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?”
– Charlie McCarthy (Edgar Bergen)

“As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”
– Sigmund Freud

“Looking for a job is a full-time job. You just don=t want it to become a career.”
– Unknown

“As a society, Americans attribute noble qualities to work.”
– Secretary of Labor Task Force

“Do something, even if it is wrong.”
– Saying attributed to Army

“The late 20th century male particularly defines himself as a worker, much more than as a family man or a member of a religious community.  So when he strikes out, he strikes out at the most significant part of his world.”
– David Phillips

“There is increasing evidence that an unsatisfactory work environment B work overload, lack of control over one=s work, non-supportive supervisors or co-workers, limited job opportunities, role ambiguity or conflict, rotating shift-work and machine-paced work — may contribute to psychological disorders.”
– Centers for Disease Control

“Working people are brighter than we think.  Their jobs may be drab, but they transcend them.”
– Studs Terkel

“Many of us have jobs that are too small for our spirit.”
– Studs Terkel

“Ought not there be an increment, earned though not yet received, from one=s daily work Can acknowledgment of man’s being?”
– Studs Terkel

“Those persons who want by the yard and try by the inch need to be kicked by the foot.”
– W. Willard Wirtz

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”
– John Updike

“Never mistake motion for action.”
– Ernest Hemingway

“The shortest answer is doing the thing.”
– Ernest Hemingway

“I know hardly anyone who works too hard.  I believe in hard work and long hours of work.  Men do not break down from overwork, but from worry and from plunging into dissipation and efforts not aligned with their work.”
– Charles E. Hughes

“Unpaid work never commands respect.”
– Harriot Stanton Blatch

“Work though we must, our jobs do not automatically determine our priorities concerning our marriages, our children, our social life, or even our health. It’s still life, constrained as it may be by limited disposable income or leisure time, and we’re still responsible for making it something we enjoy or endure.”
– Melinda M. Marshall

“Courage, determination, and hard work are all very nice, but not so nice as an oil well in the backyard.”
– Mason Cooley

“Work saves us from melancholy. Pleasure exposes us to it.”
– Mason Cooley

“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”
– John Stuart Mill

“No man goes before his time unless the boss leaves early.”
– Groucho Marx

“Nothing of a worthwhile, durable nature in the world has ever been produced with sweat.”
– Herbert Lockyer

“Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn=t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.”
– Robert Benchley

“The greatest producer of real work is a necessity.”
– Unknown

“Work is life, you know, and without it, there=s nothing but fear and insecurity.”
– John Lennon

“There are far too many people in the world who live without working, and far too many who work without living.”
– Diogenes

“He that will not live by toil Has no right on English soil!”
– Charles Kingsley

“Being forced to work and forced to do your best, will bred in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.”
– Charles Kingsley

“Toil is the true knight’s pastime.”
– Charles Kingsley

“I don’t like work no man does, but I like what is in work:  the chance to find yourself, your own reality for yourself, not for others what no other man can ever know.”
– Joseph Conrad

“Work is valued by the social value of the worker.”
– Gloria Steinem

“Labor itself is but a sorrowful song, The protest of the weak against the strong.”
– F.W. Farber

“To generous souls, every task is noble.”
– Euripedes

“His sole concern with work was considering how he might best avoid it.”
– Anatole France

“Pennies do not come from heaven — they have to be earned here on earth.”
– Margaret Thatcher

“Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted.”
– David Bly

“Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

“We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.”
– John Dos Passos

“Hard work. Well, that’s all right for people who don’t know how to do anything else. It’s all right for people who aren’t lucky. But once you’re lucky, you don’t have to work for other people. You make them work for you.”
– Dan Totheroh

“Work is and always has been my salvation and I thank the Lord for it.”
– Louisa May Alcott

“Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion.”
– Marta Zahaykevich

“The function of work is to provide man with a living: not for the purpose of enlarging his capacities to create.  The social meaning of work derives from the acts of creation it makes possible.”
– Lewis Munford

“Treat people as adults.  Treat them as partners; treat them with dignity; treat them with respect. Treat them B not capital spending and automation B as the primary source of productivity gains.  These are the fundamental lessons from the excellent companies research. In other words if you want productivity and the financial reward that goes with it, you must treat your workers as your most important asset.”
– Thomas J. Peters

“Work becomes at once a delight and a tyrant. For even when the time comes and you can relax, you hardly know how.”
– Alice Foote MacDougall

“The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.”
– Robert Reich

“I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.”
– Bruce Grocott

“This is the advent of automation, which in a few decades probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity.  Freedom from labor is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established chores of the few.”
– Hannah Arendt

“Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.”
– Raoul Vaneigem

“You have a lifetime to work, but children are only young once.”
– Polish Proverb

“Work is love made visible.”
– Kahlil Gibran

“I don’t have anything against work. I just figure, why deprive somebody who really loves it.”
– Dobie Gillis

“Like the bee, we should make our industry our amusement.”
– Oliver Goldsmith

“Home is where I work and I work everywhere.”
– Alfred Nobel