48 Inspiring Quotes For Work

In the hustle and bustle of the modern workplace, a little inspiration can go a long way. Whether you're chasing deadlines, managing projects, or navigating the complexities of remote teams, the right words can ignite motivation and transform your mindset. This curated collection of 48 inspiring quotes is designed to uplift your spirits and enhance your productivity. Dive in to find the perfect words to keep you inspired, focused, and on track in your professional journey.

1. “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.” - Harry S. Truman

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

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

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

5. “We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.” - George Santayana

6. “In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present - I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?” - Marcus Aurelius

7. “Few great men could pass personnel. ” - Paul Goodman

8. “How can one explain this trend towards a more colorless and shallow life? Well, the work was easier, if less healthy, and it brought in more money, more leisure, and perhaps more entertainment. A day in the country is long and hard. And yet the fruits of their present life were worthless compared to a single coin of their former life: a rest in the evening and a rural festivity. That they no longer knew the old kind of happiness was obvious from the discontentment which spread over their features. Soon dissatisfaction, prevailing over all their other moods, became their religion.” - Ernst Jünger

9. “The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job.Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin.The job is not the work.” - Seth Godin

10. “That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.” - Charles Bukowski

11. “Don’t worry, I’m not quitting. I’ve decided I’m going to stay andmake his life a living hell while I run his business into the ground.--Kim to Abe” - Devon Rhodes

12. “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

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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” - Albert Einstein

17. “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

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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the secret of fulfillment is "to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.” - Winifred Gallagher

22. “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

23. “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

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

25. “I used to work at the unemployment office. I hated it, because when they fired me, I had to show up to work anyway.” - Wally Wang

26. “Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.” - John Muir

27. “Go on with your work as usual, for work is a blessed solace.” - Louisa May Alcott

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

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

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

31. “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

32. “If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.” - Darryl F. Zanuck

33. “The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.” - Richard Bach

34. “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

35. “Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.” - Maya Angelou

36. “[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

37. “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

38. “Patronage of NegationI am constantly confronted by other people’s worksThat I could have created myself.And I am constantly disappointed by them.Sadly, I have to recognize themFor what they are: inferior versionsOf what I could have doneIf I’d been insecure enough in my abilitiesTo do anything.” - John Tottenham

39. “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

40. “I often ask, "What do you want to work at? If you have the chance. When you get out of school, college, the service, etc." Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and projects, highly approved by Papa. I'm pleased for them* but it's a bit boring, because they are such squares. Quite a few will, with prompting, come out with astounding stereotyped, conceited fantasies, such as becoming a movie actor when they are "discovered" "like Marlon Brando, but in my own way." Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defensively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that he knows very well what he is going to do; it is something great; and he is indeed already doing it, which is the real test. The usual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is "I don't know," meaning, "I'm looking; I haven't found the right thing; it's discouraging but not hopeless." But the terrible answer is, "Nothing." The young man doesn't want to do anything. I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at Van Wagner's Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and all of them had this one thing to say: "Nothing." They didn't believe that what to work at was the kind of thing one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of them would work for the electric company in town, but they couldn't care less, I turned away from the conversation abruptly because of the uncontrollable burning tears in my eyes and constriction in my chest. Not feeling sorry for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity (they were nice kids). And it is out of that incident that many years later I am writing this book.” - Paul Goodman

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

42. “One thing I have learned from many years of watching my father is that some people, the best ones, are motivated more by the chance to prove themselves than by a command to serve. It is the work itself that calls them onward, especially if they believe they are the only ones who can do it.” - Rae Carson

43. “No one tape her deepest gifts through shame, guilt or anger. In fact, if you come from obligation, others smell the sadness in your blood and they will run the other way,” - Tama Kieves

44. “Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for boredom and they are seldom to be pitied. Where people have not yet found their work, they may be more pitied than those that beg their bread. When a man knows his work and will not do it, pity him more than one who is to be hanged tomorrow.” - George MacDonald

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

46. “A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.” - Paul Valery

47. “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

48. “Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it, otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we'll starve. Do the job then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman.” - Aldous Huxley