132 Inspiring Work Quotes

In the hustle and bustle of our work lives, a little inspiration can go a long way. Whether you're navigating a challenging project, seeking motivation to start your day, or simply need a reminder of why you love what you do, the right words can provide a powerful boost. We've carefully curated a collection of the top 132 inspiring work quotes to ignite your passion and fuel your drive. From legendary leaders to modern-day thought influencers, these quotes are perfect for lifting your spirits and empowering you to achieve your best. Dive in and let these timeless words of wisdom energize your professional journey.

1. “I've learned one thing, and that's to quit worrying about stupid things. You have four years to be irresponsible here, relax. Work is for people with jobs. You'll never remember class time, but you'll remember the time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So stay out late. Go out with your friends on a Tuesday when you have a paper due on Wednesday. Spend money you don't have. Drink 'til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does...” - Tom Petty

2. “I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” - Jerome K. Jerome

3. “God sells us all things at the price of labor.” - Leonardo da Vinci

4. “If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.” - Plato

5. “No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” - Theodore Roosevelt

6. “Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.” - Curtis Sittenfeld

7. “No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

8. “Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds.” - Gordon B. Hinckley

9. “In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own.” - Madeleine L'Engle

10. “If you can work anywhere, anytime, then pretty soon you're working everywhere all the time.” - Judy Nichols

11. “No matter how much pressure you feel at work, if you could find ways to relax for at least five minutes every hour, you’d be more productive.” - Joyce Brothers

12. “Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.” - Voltaire

13. “A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.” - Leo Tolstoy

14. “Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.” - Louisa May Alcott

15. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. ” - Adam Smith

16. “Times will change for the better when you change.” - Maxwell Maltz

17. “You should not confuse your career with your life.” - Dave Barry

18. “If you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.” - Ogden Nash

19. “It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious. ” - Kin Hubbard

20. “When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?” - Don Marquis

21. “If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.” - George Lois

22. “Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.” - Honoré de Balzac

23. “In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.” - Robert Sexton

24. “When you see what some girls marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.” - Helen Rowland

25. “The human worker will go the way of the horse.” - Wassily Leontief

26. “It [money] doesn't have anything have anything to do with the magnificence of a person. It doesn't. What matters is what you make. Whether it's a cake for bingo night or a costume for a saint or a wall of water--whatever you pour into this life is what makes you rich.” - Adriana Trigiani

27. “The world, and therefore the workplace, is full of idiots. And the reality of life is that when you get rid of one idiot, another will show up to take his place. It's the curse of humanity.” - Larry Winget

28. “There should be no separation between spontaneous work with an emotional tone and work directed by the intellect. Both are supplementary to each other and must be regarded as intimately connected. Discipline and freedom are thus to be seen as elements of equal weight, each partaking of the other.” - Armin Hofmann

29. “Work like hell, tell everyone everything you know, close a deal with a handshake, and have fun.” - Harold Edgerton

30. “Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.” - H.L. Mencken

31. “When you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,And what is it to work with love?It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit.Work is love made visible” - Kahlil Gibran

32. “It was ironic, really - you want to die because you can't be bothered to go on living - but then you're expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops.And if you've managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.” - Marian Keyes

33. “Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.” - Ayn Rand

34. “In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.” - Lao Tzu

35. “The French say you get hungry when you’re eating, and I get inspired when I’m working. It’s my engine” - Karl Lagerfeld

36. “If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.” - Terry Pratchett

37. “The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray." (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)” - Wendell Berry

38. “It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of moral human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use...If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer...Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. (pg. 316, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)” - Wendell Berry

39. “I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.” - Craig Ferguson

40. “I like to reinvent myself — it’s part of my job.” - Karl Lagerfeld

41. “My parents' work ethic amazed me. How could they put in such long hours, day after day?Part of the reason was to keep the family going - to keep me going. I realized that, although we had different values derived from different cultures and wouldn't agree on certain issues, they were good people, incredible people, and I loved and respected them.” - Harvey Pekar

42. “He sighed. It had come to this. He was a responsible authority, and people could use terms like "core values" at him with impunity. ” - Terry Pratchett

43. “In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.” - Karl Marx

44. “If the least thing goes wrong with a saddle, or clothes, or a boot, you cannot find a soul to make repairs, and the other day a cobbler answered us, 'Yes, that's right, I'm a shoemaker, and sometimes I work, but I'm not in the mood right now.” - Louis-Philippe

45. “There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is having lots to do and not doing it.” - Andrew Jackson

46. “There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.” - Coco Chanel

47. “Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps full the dinner pail is valuable.” - George Washington Carver

48. “Jika kosakata yang Anda kuasai sangat banyak, akan menghemat waktu dalam membuka kamus. Walaupun kosakata yang terbatas bisa dipecahkan dengan mencari arti kata dalam kamus, ini akan sangat merepotkan dan bisa membuat proses penerjemahan tersendat-sendat.” - Silvester Goridus Sukur

49. “When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.” - Madeleine L'Engle

50. “It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge.” - Wilhelm Reich

51. “What would you consider a good job?" Answered as follows:"A good job is one in which I don't have to work, and get paid a lot of money."When I heard that I cheered and yelled and felt that he should be given an A+, for he had perfectly articulated the American dream of those who despise knowledge. What a politician that kid would have made.” - Isaac Asimov

52. “Because I'm a man who works, who knows what a human being is like inside, who knows that every human being has his worth, and who wants the world to be governed by work and not by opinions about work.” - Wilhelm Reich

53. “How, then,' I hear you ask, 'shall I attain my end, whether it be Christian love, socialism, or American democracy?' Your Christian love and your socialism and your American democracy are what you do each day, your manner of thinking each hour, of embracing your life companion and loving your child; they are your attitude of social responsibility towards your work, and your determination not to become like the crushers of life you so hate.” - Wilhelm Reich

54. “The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.” - Chuck Close

55. “Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him.” - Benjamin Franklin

56. “Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.” - Anne Wilson Schaef

57. “No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one — if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.” - Sigmund Freud

58. “Sadly, in our technological, impersonal, and avaricious consumer society, people merely hold on to jobs. They put in their time, leave at the five o'clock bell, pick up their pay checks, and leave the whole business behind them. Work, for so many, becomes a necessary evil. They go at it grudgingly, at best resignedly. It is hard to fault them; the stressful conditions and uncertainty under which so many workers labor force them into an adversarial relationship with their occupations and employers.” - Robert Dykstra

59. “Work is a blessing when it helps us to think about what we are doing; but it becomes a curse when its sole use is to stop us thinking about the meaning of life.” - Paulo Coelho

60. “Never work.” - Guy Debord

61. “The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it.” - Antonin Sertillanges

62. “This primary question of life organization is immensely important. If making money is the main goal, a person can often forget what his or her true interests are or how he or she wants to deserve recognition from others. It is much more difficult to add on other values to a life that started out with just making money in mind than it is to make some personally interesting endeavor financially possible or even profitable.” - Pekka Himanen

63. “Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” - Joan Didion

64. “How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.” - Philip Larkin

65. “Life is short, so live it full! Know that the work that the Lord has begun in you, He will finish it. So, honor Him today with your gift to Him, "steadfastness/endurance to live His work, and not yours. It may get tough along this journey where the enemy speaks "quit", but remember, God is not through with what He began in you. In God, your life shall be made full and complete( whole)!” - Author Anita R. Sneed-Carter

66. “After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited--long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms--what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling.” - Alain De Botton

67. “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” - Steven Pressfield

68. “The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.” - Steven Pressfield

69. “Only super-efforts count.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

70. “Your environment will eat your goals and plans for breakfast.” - Steve Pavlina

71. “I feel like every project I work on is a dream project, so long as I am learning.” - Simeon Kondev

72. “If you're not inthe mood, you can't do that stuff right.” - J.D. Salinger

73. “The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.” - Joel Salatin

74. “What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

75. “Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.” - Deepak Chopra

76. “Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.” - Thomas Moore

77. “The common man prays, 'I want a cookie right now!' And God responds, 'If you'd listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies.” - Criss Jami

78. “C'est bien difficile de travailler quand on n'en a pas l'habitude.” - Frédéric Marcelin

79. “Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.” - Mary Doria Russell

80. “I get up at seven yeah and I go to work at nine. I got no time for livin'. Yes I'm workin' all the time. It seems to me I could live my life a lot better than I think I am. I guess that's why they call me they call me the workin' man.” - Rush

81. “We need to remember what's important in life: friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn't matter, but work is third.” - Leslie Knope

82. “What do dogs do on their day off?; Can't lie around – that's their job!” - George Carlin

83. “Two months in Shanghai, and what does she have to show for herself? She had been full of plans on the plane ride over, had studied her phrase book as if cramming for an exam, had been determined to refine her computational model with a new set of data, expecting insights and breakthroughs, plotting notes for a new article. Only the time has trickled away so quickly. She has meandered through the days chatting with James instead of gathering data. At night, she has gone out to dinners and bars. [James'] Chinese has not improved; her computational model has barely been touched. She does not know what she has been doing with herself, and now an airplane six days away is waiting for her.” - Ruiyan Xu

84. “Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.” - Bonnie Jo Campbell

85. “I never realizedtill nowhow hard the brain has to workto make the body do what it asks.Or maybe how hard the body has to workto ignorethe brain.” - Thalia Chaltas

86. “It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.” - Jerome K. Jerome

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

88. “If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.” - Criss Jami

89. “We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.” - Wendell Berry

90. “Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.” - Wendell Berry

91. “As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.” - Criss Jami

92. “You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.” - Neil Gaiman

93. “[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families--only to find that by then their families were gone.” - Larissa MacFarquhar

94. “As long as you're in the food business, why not make sweets?” - Anne Frank

95. “For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life?” - W.G. Sebald

96. “We're professionals. People make deals, they need to stick to them. That's the way it works, if it's going to work at all.” - James Sallis

97. “allowing only ordinary ability and opportunity, we may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work into which the whole heart is put[...]There is no royal road to perfection.” - Frederick Douglass

98. “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.” - Steve Jobs

99. “And I envied her that she had chosen her work herself and was doing what she wanted to do. I don't suppose I had any idea what I 'wanted' and so I was chosen, not choosing. There's glory and honor in being chosen. But not much room for free will.” - Elizabeth Wein

100. “One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and whatpeople can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities,the result is boredom. But when thematch is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.” - Daniel H. Pink

101. “Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.” - Haruki Murakami

102. “My daddy. . . . . used to say, ‘Honey, find something you love to do and then figure out a way to get paid for it.’ He understood that where your true passion is, there your joy is also. And a joyful life is a truly successful life. Perhaps not by the world’s standards, but whose life is it anyway?” - Kathy Lee Gifford

103. “The thing that bound us together at Apple was the ability to make things that were going to change the world. That was very important.” - Steve Jobs

104. “We never know how God will answer our prayers, but we can expect that He will get us involved in His plan for the answer. If we are true intercessors, we must be ready to take part in God’s work on behalf of the people for whom we pray.” - Corrie Ten Boom

105. “There's a very mean girl down the hall who's trying to get me fired. I'm no good with confrontation, so whenever I say, "Have a wonderful day," to her out loud, I'm really saying, "Be nice to me or I will stab you in the face with a fork," in my head. I wish her a wonderful day at least once an hour. She's starting to get paranoid and jumpy about it, but there's really nothing she can do, because she can't complain about me wishing her a wonderful day without sounding totally insane. This is why you should never mess with nonconfrontational people. Because they're too unstable to second-guess. And because they're totally the kind of people who could suddenly snap, and stab you in the face with a fork.” - Jenny Lawson

106. “Billionaires’ working hours are twenty-four seven. They don’t wait till Monday.” - Sophie Page

107. “It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.” - Russell Kirk

108. “The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.” - Noam Chomsky

109. “Sunday, with its immunity from work, was devised for slaves who got out of all the work they could during the week.” - Elbert Hubbard

110. “One thing work givesis the joy of not working,a minute here or therewhen I stand and only breathe,receiving the good of the air.It comes back. Good work donecomes back into the mind,a free breath drawn.” - Wendell Berry

111. “Work like an angel, dress like a demon, live like a ghost, and dream like a human.” - Rebecca McKinsey

112. “What infinite heart's-easeMust kings neglect, that private men enjoy!And what have kings, that privates have not too,Save ceremony, save general ceremony?And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st moreOf mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?What are thy rents? what are thy comings in?O ceremony, show me but thy worth!What is thy soul of adoration?Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,Creating awe and fear in other men?Wherein thou art less happy being fear'dThan they in fearing.What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!Think'st thou the fiery fever will go outWith titles blown from adulation?Will it give place to flexure and low bending?Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,That play'st so subtly with a king's repose;I am a king that find thee, and I know'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,The farced title running 'fore the king,The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pompThat beats upon the high shore of this world,No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,Not all these, laid in bed majestical,Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,Who with a body fill'd and vacant mindGets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread;Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,But, like a lackey, from the rise to setSweats in the eye of Phoebus and all nightSleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,And follows so the ever-running year,With profitable labour, to his grave:And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.The slave, a member of the country's peace,Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wotsWhat watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,Whose hours the peasant best advantages.” - William Shakespeare

113. “More than anything, I like just being there while he works, doing what he knows to do, in his own place.” - Deb Caletti

114. “Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.” - George Eliot

115. “I must go on living. And, though itmay be childish of me, I can't go on insimple compliance. From now on I muststruggle with the world. I thought thatMother might well be the last of thosewho can end their lives beautifully andsadly, struggling with no one, neitherhating nor betraying anyone. In theworld to come there will be no room forsuch people. The dying are beautiful,but to live, to survive – those thingssomehow seem hideous andcontaminated with blood.” - Osamu Dazai

116. “Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.” - Alice Neel

117. “Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.” - James Michener

118. “I had a day when I was busy in the world, where the activity created a turmoil on the surface of my consciousness like waves on the surface of the ocean, which made it difficult to see through the waves to the inner silence. It reminded me that we need to develop both the capacity to use the mind when engaged in activity and social relations, and to be able to let go of the activity and to come in contact with the deep inner silence. The relationship between being active in the world and in social relations and the inner silence is like the relationship between the waves on the surface of the ocean and the deep inner silence on the bottom of the ocean.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

119. “Yes, it is God who works in you. And, yes, there is work for you to do.Yes, the Spirit empowers you to do the work. And, yes, you do the work.” - Francis Chan

120. “... a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only by earning a living.” - Mortimer Jerome Adler

121. “Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society.” - Os Guinness

122. “I also remember it was Sunday night because that was the time I felt most depressed and vulnerable. Somehow have a moment to contemplate the miserable, low-paying week that lay ahead was more painful than living it.” - Adam Carolla

123. “I continueto believe in miracles. But i know that miracles come to thosewho work very hard” - Cinda Williams Chima

124. “The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from the inside.” - Aravind Adiga

125. “Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel.” - Steve Krug

126. “Why do I keep evading my work? Is it because I’m afraid of being confronted by my lack of abilities?” - Candace Bushnell

127. “Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby,” - Sheryl Sandberg

128. “And, for the gods sake, don't waste the whole day working! Make time for a bit of adventure dear. This life is only so long.” - Adrastus Rood

129. “I say, you don't know how I could raise fifty quid somehow, do you?""Why don't you work?""Work?" said young Bingo, surprised. "What, me? No, I shall have to think of some way.” - P.G. Wodehouse

130. “Whoever has the power takes the noun while the less powerful get an adjective. No one wants her achievements modified.We all just want to be the noun.” - Sheryl Sandberg

131. “Work is tough for everyone but for Kyle Shannon, it's just murder.” - Linda Mickey

132. “...in Aristotle...leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work...leisure is pursued solely for its own sake...: the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ...gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate good is otium — the opposite is negotium, or gainful work.We have sought too much counsel in the proto-Calvinist work ethic preached by St Paul...during the cessation of work we nurture family, educate, nourish friendships....in loafing, most of our innovations come...the routine of daily work has too often served as...sleep...a refuge from two crucial states — awakedness to the needs of others, and to the transcendent, which only comes...loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off.” - Francine du Plessix Gray