43 Inspiring Work Quotes

In the fast-paced world of professional life, a little inspiration can go a long way. Whether you're seeking the motivation to start a new project, push through a challenging task, or simply need a gentle reminder of why you love what you do, the right words can make all the difference. That's why we've curated a collection of the top 43 inspiring work quotes. These nuggets of wisdom come from successful entrepreneurs, authors, leaders, and thinkers across various industries. Each quote has the potential to uplift, energize, and propel you toward achieving your professional goals. Dive in and let these powerful words fuel your drive and passion for work.

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

2. “Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.” - Anne Frank

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

4. “The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.” - Barack Obama

5. “Arbeit ist sichtbar gemachte Liebe.” - Khalil Gibran

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

7. “We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.” - Ayn Rand

8. “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

9. “When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.” - Gustave Flaubert

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

11. “I don't really like coffee, she said, but I don't really like it when my head hits my desk when I fall asleep either. ” - Brian Andreas

12. “Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. (pg.132, The Body and the Earth)” - Wendell Berry

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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Do what you want that works.” - Toba Beta

19. “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

20. “So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange. Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned. Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work ate too much.” - Jack London

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

22. “The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

23. “Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do, which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers. ” - Thomas S. Monson

24. “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

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

26. “Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.” - Kenzaburō Ōe

27. “As Gill says, "every man is called to give love to the work of his hands. Every man is called to be an artist." The small family farm is one of the last places - they are getting rarer every day - where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker - and some farmers still do talk about "making the crops" - is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. This certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical or uneconomic one. In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer, and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the means of life, the goodness of food, and the longevity and dependability of the sources of food, both natural and cultural. The proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need.” - Wendell Berry

28. “Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade.” - Rudyard Kipling

29. “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

30. “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.” - Simon Sinek

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

32. “Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.” - Robert M. Pirsig

33. “Life Without WorkTo do nothingIn this day and age,When so much pointless workIs being produced,Could almost be considered an achievement.It all compares most unfavorablyWith my own imaginaryBody of work.” - John Tottenham

34. “Dedication. DEDICATION. That is the only way to become a writer. Write every day. Write until your fingers bleed, your eyes bleed, your soul bleeds. From that blood, stories are born. It's worth it.” - Belle DiMonté

35. “A monkey could do my job better and with more hilarious results.” - Marie-Helene Bertino

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

37. “As long as there are ways we can serve, then we have a job to do.” - Marianne Williamson

38. “If you do the job badly enough, sometimes you don't get asked to do it again.” - Bill Watterson

39. “People who are winning at working don't ignore the problems they encounter.” - Nan S. Russell

40. “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

41. “I work in my pajamas most of the time. No matter what you’re wearing, you can sound businesslike on the phone.” - Juliet Blackwell

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

43. “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