150 Inspiring Work Quotes

In the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, we often seek a spark of inspiration to keep us motivated and focused. Whether you're navigating a challenging project, striving for a promotion, or simply trying to maintain a positive mindset at work, a few words of wisdom can make all the difference. That's why we've carefully selected 150 of the most inspiring work quotes to help you stay motivated, driven, and ready to tackle any professional hurdle. Dive in and let these powerful quotes reignite your passion for what you do.

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 love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” - Douglas Adams

3. “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” - Leo Tolstoy

4. “Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.” - Charles J. Sykes

5. “We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work” - Thomas A. Edison

6. “Out of clutter, find simplicity.” - Albert Einstein

7. “It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.” - Flannery O'Connor

8. “If you care about what you do and work hard at it, there isn't anything you can't do if you want to.” - Jim Henson

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

10. “People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.” - Frederick Douglass

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

12. “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” - Woodrow Wilson

13. “It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.” - John Irving

14. “Get going. Move forward. Aim High. Plan a takeoff. Don't just sit on the runway and hope someone will come along and push the airplane. It simply won't happen. Change your attitude and gain some altitude. Believe me, you'll love it up here.” - Donald Trump

15. “Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.” - Confucius

16. “Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair.” - David Livingstone

17. “You did what you were told or you didn't get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn't your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn't your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care.” - Terry Pratchett

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

19. “There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone--many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF -- 'Thank God It's Friday.' They live for the weekends, when they can go do what they really want to do.” - Richard Nelson Bolles

20. “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” - Toni Cade Bambara

21. “The truth is despite the hard work and juggling required to keep the different facets of the frantic life afloat, the "superwoman" has one marvelous compensation. Being busy and being seen to be busy lets you off the hook. Buys you a way out of all aspects of your many roles you secretly despise ... like cleaning cupboards ... or entertaining your husband's business friends. When you combine wife, mother, career and all, each role become the perfect excuse for avoiding the worst aspects of the other.” - Bettina Arndt

22. “With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.” - Roman Payne

23. “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.” - Michelangelo Buonarroti

24. “..it's not how much you work, but how working so much makes you feel that counts. And how I felt was iserable.” - Jonathon Lazear

25. “I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!” - Audre Lorde

26. “There was a sergeant at a desk. I knew he was a sergeant because I recognized the marks on his uniform, and I knew it was a desk because it's always a desk. There's always someone at a desk, except when it's a table that functions as a desk. You sit behind a desk, and everyone knows you're supposed to be there, and that you're doing something that involves your brain. It's an odd, special kind of importance. I think everyone should get a desk; you can sit behind it when you feel like you don't matter.” - Steven Brust

27. “He who moves not forward, goes backward.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28. “When I am at my work each dayIn the fields so fresh and greenI often think of riches and the way things might have beenBut believe me when I tell you when I get home each dayI'm as happy as a sandboy with my wee cup of tay” - Patrick McCabe

29. “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

30. “Cat, I'll let you in on a little secret. We don't all love our jobs every day. And doing something you have passion for doesn't make the work part of it any easier...It just makes you less likely to quit.” - Kate Jacobs

31. “Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.” - Adrian Tan

32. “DolorI have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,Desolation in immaculate public places,Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.” - Theodore Roethke

33. “For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs--jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.” - Milton Friedman

34. “The greatest weariness comes from work not done.” - Eric Hoffer

35. “Do you think people love having jobs, Sylvia asks Peter in because they offer a condoned but false responsibility that masks, for at least eight hours a day, true responsibility?” - David Bajo

36. “Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.” - Amy Lowell

37. “I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.” - Charles Dickens

38. “The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of enterprise does require workers to be consistent, predictable, precise, uniform, and even to a certain extent creative, it does not really require them to be persons, that is, to live examined lives, to grow, to develop character, to search for truth, to know themselves, etc.” - Craig M. Gay

39. “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

40. “As the connections have been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness. And there is work that is restorative, convivial, dignified and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of connections - as one is now said to work "for a living" or "to support a family" - but the enactment of connections. It is living, and a way of living; it is not support for a family in the sense of an exterior brace or prop, but is one of the forms and acts of love. (pg. 133, The Body and the Earth)” - Wendell Berry

41. “We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsible within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone. (pg. 134, The Body and the Earth)” - Wendell Berry

42. “Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)” - Wendell Berry

43. “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

44. “I’ve come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power.” - Jason Mraz

45. “So, let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look over not only ourselves, but each other.” - Barack Obama

46. “To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.” - Carl Sandburg

47. “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

48. “Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make them real. ” - Robert Fanney

49. “We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")” - Wendell Berry

50. “And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ.” - Anonymous

51. “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

52. “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

53. “If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.” - J.G. Ballard

54. “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” - Alan Turing

55. “Daja: "He and Rosethorn work together? They hate each other." Lark: "I didn't say they liked it.- Daja and Lark referring to Rosethorn and Crane's cooperation on finding the cures for new diseases” - Tamora Pierce

56. “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

57. “Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!” - Nick Hornby

58. “Things were different back then. Today if a woman was asked to do the things we did back then, she would revolt, declare that she wasn’t anyone’s slave, wouldn’t be put upon in that fashion. But you have to remember that this was before automatic washers and dishwashers, before blenders and electric knives. If the carpet was going to get cleaned, someone, usually a woman, would have to take a broom to it, or would have to haul it on her shoulders to the yard and beat the dirt out of it. If the wet clothes were going to get dry, someone had to hang them in the yard, take them down from the yard, heat the iron on the fire, press them, and finally fold or hang them. Food was chopped by hand, fires were stoked by hand, water was carried by hand, anything roasted, toasted, broiled, dried, beaten, pressed, packed, or pickled, was done so by hand. Our version of a laborsaving device was called a spouse. If a man had a woman by his side, he didn’t have to clean and cook for himself. If a woman had a man by her side, she didn’t have to go out, earn a living, then come home and wrestle the house to the ground in the evening.” - Susan Lynn Peterson

59. “Never work.” - Guy Debord

60. “Why do I have to do the sewin'? 'Cause I'm a girl? Is that it? It ain't fair, I tell ya!” - Sean Cullen

61. “My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.” - Raymond Carver

62. “Work on." Work as if every time you started with and every time you finish.” - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

63. “Some managers hire people they're excited to work with. I prefer to hire people I'm excited to dominate.” - Mykle Hansen

64. “My job is to scream cockle-doodle-doo. Don't blame me if the sun doesn't rise.” - Janet Skeslien Charles

65. “Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!” - Roman Payne

66. “One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America -- and at least double that number with a conscience. Hard as they try, they simply can't turn their heads away from an injustice when they see one taking place.” - Michael Francis Moore

67. “When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good........An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.” - Alain De Botton

68. “I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.” - Simone de Beauvoir

69. “Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?” - Alain De Botton

70. “The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.” - Alain De Botton

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

72. “What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.” - Alain De Botton

73. “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones” - Helena Rubinstein

74. “Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?""Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside.” - Christopher Moore

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

76. “...I have to go home and get a few things done. If I don’t get out the Pledge soon, the dust bunnies are going to be leaving tracks on my furniture...” - Carla Foft

77. “Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.” - Joe Frazier

78. “Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.” - Karl Lagerfield

79. “Spending time with God is the key to our strength and success in all areas of life. Be sure that you never try to work God into your schedule, but always work your schedule around Him.” - Joyce Meyer

80. “I am unpersuaded that relative poverty and hard work are greater adversities than relative affluence and free time.” - Dallin H. Oaks

81. “Turn off the computer. Often, an open computer screen distracts us from other activities. Our eye catches a glimpse of something and before you know it, we’re back at the desk and surfing away.” - James Chartrand

82. “The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.” - Leo Tolstoy

83. “These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing, I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Above who is experimentingWith various mixtures of human character which goes best, All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us. There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to doThen you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.” - Stevie Smith

84. “Touch paper only once.” - Robert Allen

85. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old” - Peter Drucker

86. “[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.” - Tahir Shah

87. “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

88. “That's what life is all about - you're busy, I'm busy, and the end result is death. Sooner or later, that's what it comes to. ("The Death Of Wang Asao")” - Xiao Hong

89. “Now ... 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. Goodbye.” - Terry Pratchett

90. “Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.” - Jane Addams

91. “There is never a traffic jam created from people going the extra mile” - Jeff Dixon

92. “Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.” - Josef Pieper

93. “If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.” - Edward Abbey

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

95. “Oh, God! That bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!” - Jacob Riis

96. “To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.” - Samuel Butler

97. “80% of man's happiness is based on love - love for others, love for self, love for family, love for friends, love for work, love for nature, and love for being loved.” - Ogwo David Emenike

98. “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

99. “Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.” - greg iles

100. “Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.” - Timothy Keller

101. “My life changed the day I moved beyond just wishing for things and I started earning them. That is the day I learned that we don't get what we wish for, we get what we work for.” - Steve Maraboli

102. “endless action and reaction. Those beautifully rounded pebbles which you gather on the sand and which you hold in your hand and marvel at their exceeding smoothness, were chiseled into their varies and graceful forms by the ceaseless action of countless waves. Nature is herself a great worker and never tolerates, without certain rebuke, any contradiction to her wise example. Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death.” - Frederick Douglass

103. “I did not myself set a high estimation on wealth, and had the affectation of most young men of lively imagination, who suppose that they can better dispense with the possession of money, than resign their time and faculties to the labour necessary to acquire it.” - Walter Scott

104. “Ah," Gary said dreamily. " 'Free time.' I've heard about that. Don't fool yourself, Fire-Top. What with extra hours of lessons for punishments, and the extra work you get every day, free time is an illusion. It's what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight. We all face up to it sooner or later--the only real free time you get here is what my honored sire chooses to give you, when he thinks you have earned it." "And he doesn't give it to you at night," Alex put in. "He gives it to you when you've been here awhile, on Market Day and sometimes a morning or afternoon all to yourself. But never at night. At night you study. During the day you study. In your sleep--” - Tamora Pierce

105. “Instead of communicating "I love you, so let me make life easy for you," I decided that my message needed to be something more along these lines: "I love you. I believe in you. I know what you're capable of. So I'm going to make you work.” - Kay Wills Wyma

106. “Like so many others of my tenure and temperament—stubborn ancients, I suppose—web reporting is anathema to everything I love about newspapering: getting a tip, developing leads, fleshing-out the details, then telling the story. Now it stops with the tip. Just verify (hopefully!) and post it. I didn’t write stories anymore; I 'produced content.” - Chris Rose

107. “My workplace is wherever I'm making something, which could be in a field in gold country, or in an abandoned warehouse on a military base.” - Adam Savage

108. “Be kind and generous to your fellows, but hard and relentless with yourself.” - Franz Bardon

109. “Jangan pernah memperlakukan tugas manapun sebagai proyek sambilan atau sekedar sampingan. Pandanglah selalu klien sebagai mitra jangka panjang.” - Rini Nurul Badariah

110. “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

111. “What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.” - Adrian P. Rogers

112. “You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in ‘75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment.” - Henry David Thoreau

113. “For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure,the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. Totell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hotturds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if hislivelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.” - Henry Miller

114. “I resented the idea of being talented. I couldn’t respect it — in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor.” - Alexander Chee

115. “Sibyl, what do you want?”“I want to live,” the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. “I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.” - Catherynne M. Valente

116. “On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative, and satisfied. In their free time people feel that there is generally not much to do and their skills are not being used, and therefore they tend to feel more sad, weak, dull, and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work less and spend more time in leisure.What does this contradictory pattern mean? There are several possible explanations, but one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like. They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

117. “Let your rest be perfect in its season, like the rest of waters that are still. If you will have a model or your living, take neither the stars, for they fly without ceasing, nor the ocean that ebbs and flows, nor the river that cannot stay, but rather let your life be like that of the summer air, which has times of noble energy and times of perfect peace. It fills the sails of ships upon the sea, and the miller thanks it on the breezy uplands; it works generously for the health and wealth of all men, yet it claims it hours of rest.. “I have pushed the fleet, I have turned the mill, I have refreshed the city, and now though the captain may walk impatiently on the quarter-deck, and the miller swear, and the city stink, I will stir no more until it pleases me.” - Philip Gilbert Hamerton

118. “we are continuing God’s work of forming, filling, and subduing. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and “unfold” creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development.” - Timothy Keller

119. “Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.” - John Derbyshire

120. “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” - Mark Twain

121. “My life will be the best illustration of all my work.” - Hans Christian Andersen

122. “Of all men, Christians should work especially hard, giving more than an honest day's work for a day's wage.” - Richard D. Phillips

123. “Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul.” - W.B. Yeats

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

125. “No matter what you write, no matter how meticulous and painstaking the creation process, someone is going to laugh, scorn, and dissect your work with criticism while another quietly falls in love with it.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

126. “Nein, die Schule hat keinen bestimmenden Einfluss auf meine Entwicklung gehabt. Die Schule hat von meinen besonderen Anlagen wohl instinktiv etwas gespürt, sie aber als obstinate Untauglichkeit gewertet und verworfen. Ein Lehrer drohte, zufällig nicht mir, sondern einem anderen Schüler, mit den Worten: "Ich werde dir deine Karriere schon verderben!" Am gleichen Tag las ich bei Storm den Spruch: "Was du immer kannst, zu werden, scheue Arbeit nicht und Wachen, aber hüte deine Seele vor dem Karrieremachen.” - Thomas Mann

127. “Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.” - Charles Bukowski

128. “People do not wander around and then find themselves at the top of Mount Everest.” - Zig Ziglar

129. “For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God's will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

130. “We don't choose our wildest dreams. They choose us.” - Tama Kieves

131. “It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again.” - Jonah Lehrer

132. “It's no use going the extra mile if people don't expect it. You will never get extra credit for it. Just invest it on something else.” - Sartika Kurniali

133. “When your livelihood depends on self-imposed productivity, you either get good at it or you find yourself in mounds of debt.” - Nacie Carson

134. “My idea of working for a living is not going to office and earning a salary. It is to build a log house and catch my own fish and till some soil.” - Girish Kohli

135. “If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.” - Alan Watts

136. “Confidence is a pencil best sharpened with paper.” - Kale Burton

137. “The big guys who ran things didn't want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn't bump up against the truth--life could be fun. Yup, they wanted you scared. They wanted you grim. They wanted you madly cranking out Barbie dolls or Post Toasties or Xerox, or they wanted you overworked and underpaid at teaching so you could at least feel smart, and they wanted you to keep having kids so you'd have to keep working at whatever job you were stuck in and not have time to think or feel or, if you did, you certainly wouldn't have time to do anything about it, or even get close to the big fun, the fun that belonged only to them. And then they wanted your kids to hop on the same treadmill.” - Bill Ripley

138. “work, pray and play not from here” - Eman Herzallah

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

140. “The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.” - Peter Drucker

141. “The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, 'But suppose you died before all the book was written?' [...] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, 'One can only work on, you know--work while it is day.” - Dan Simmons

142. “Don't listen to a man who says we have to work together as a team. He means we have to work as he says.” - C.J. Langenhoven

143. “Murderers don't get forgiven just because we promise to be good from now on. We have to earn our way back. One hundred is the price. One hundred lives for each we took. That seems fair. That's how we get whole again and that's our work, from now until as long as it takes.” - Bill Willingham

144. “He found that the business of optimism was no mean task.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

145. “When you are stressed on mind...to pour it out, is the behaviour, most kind!” - Sujit Lalwani

146. “The people you work with are just people you were thrown together with. Y'know, you don't know them, it wasn't your choice. And yet you spend more time with them thanyou do your friends or your family.” - Tim Canterbury

147. “You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.” - Don Roff

148. “Although he too was heading to work, Shahid was glad he wasn't dragging himself off to some office job. Shahid's view: anybody who had to wear a suit to work died a little inside, every day.” - John Lanchester

149. “I don't ever want to be a fair-weather anything. Playing through the elements is always better than sitting on the sidelines.” - Lorii Myers

150. “olhe, hoje é possível reviver o fascismo, quer saber. é possível na perfeição. basta ser-se trabalhador dependente. é o suficiente para perceber o que é comer e calar, e por vezes nem comer, só calar. vá espirar esses patrões por aí fora. conte pelos dedos os que têm no peito um coração a florescer de amor pelo proletariado. que porra de conversa comunista. mas não é possível deixar de ter conversas comunistas enquanto não se largar a merda das ideias do capitalismo de circo que está montado. um capitalismo de especulação no qual o trabalho não corresponde a riqueza e já nem a mérito, apenas a um fardo do qual há quem não se consiga livrar.” - valter hugo mãe