48 Inspiring Work Quotes

In the hustle and bustle of our daily work lives, it's easy to lose sight of what truly inspires us. Whether you're facing a challenging deadline, seeking motivation for a new project, or simply striving to maintain a positive outlook at work, sometimes all it takes is a few powerful words to reignite your passion and drive. Our specially curated collection of the top 48 inspiring work quotes is designed to do just that—spark your enthusiasm and remind you of the potential that lies within each of us. With insights from some of the world’s greatest thinkers, leaders, and pioneers, these quotes will not only motivate but also offer new perspectives on work and success. Dive in and discover which words resonate with you as you embark on your journey towards achieving your professional goals.

1. “I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.” - Charles Lamb

2. “Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.” - Gustave Flaubert

3. “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” - Alasdair Gray

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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking. ” - John Kennedy Toole

8. “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

9. “I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.” - Raymond Carver

10. “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

11. “The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.” - George Carlin

12. “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.” - Louis Nizer

13. “I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try -- without let up -- to break you.” - Mary Karr

14. “Normally I give permission to take my daughter for a walk after only the building of a wall and a stone pathway.' He smiled. 'For future reference.''But, Pan, I knew after the first week that a walk was not the only thing I would request,' the Pigeon said, smiling, 'and winter will be here soon.” - Brigid Pasulka

15. “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

16. “Work diligently. Work hard. Focus. Perform as if you are at the Olympics. One day, unexpectedly, it will start paying off.” - Joan Marques

17. “Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.” - Paul Hawken

18. “To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,To lie flat and know nothing and be still,Are the two trades of man; and which is worseI know not, but I know that both are ill.” - A.E. Housman

19. “Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose” - Leonardo da Vinci

20. “After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.” - Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows)

21. “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

22. “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

23. “Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

24. “..The stuff you learn beforehand will never be one-tenth as useful as the stuff you learn the hard way, on the job.” - Hugh MacLeod

25. “If this country is ever demoralized, it will come from trying to live without work.” - Abraham Lincoln

26. “Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living” - Jerome K. Jerome

27. “Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page.” - Roman Payne

28. “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

29. “Will that be all?” I asked the pimply faced teen who ogled my exposed legs as if in heat. My pen tapped impatiently on the notepad while I waited for him to look up. Slowly his dull grey eyes roved over my body and a limp smile drew up his thin, crusted lips making him look more weasel than human. “Yep. That’d be it,” his cheerful, adolescent voice cracked.“Great,” I mumbled, walking back behind the counter.” - Brandi Salazar

30. “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

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

32. “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

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

34. “Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.” - Jeff Lindsay

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Assiduity, it means sit down until you do it. Commit yourself to your work and study.” - Lucas Remmerswaal

39. “Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish.” - E.M. Bounds

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.” - Bette Davis

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

45. “«Gavin did not enjoy his hard work. The optimistic startup guys sending in these crazy proposals were guys who enjoyed their work. Gavin had the solid, old-fashioned idea that work should be painful, so that people would pay you for doing it. If the “work” was fulfilling, then work was a form of entertainment. The workers should be paying people for being entertained.»” - Bruce Sterling

46. “Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.” - Michael Foley

47. “The American College of Sports Medicine found that the productivity of people after exercise was an average of 65 percent higher than those who did not exercise. If I have something that's really bothering me, so much that it almost hurts my head to try to sort it out, I always find the solution in a puddle of sweat! Intense exercise is like taking a magic pill that gives you the ability to solve problems like a superhero.” - Chalene Johnson

48. “A great place to work is one in which you trust the people you work for, have pride in what you do, and enjoy the people you work with.” - Robert Levering