78 Inspirational Career Quotes

Finding the right words to inspire and motivate oneself in a career can be transformative. Whether you're looking for a boost to start your day, wisdom to navigate challenges, or just a dose of encouragement to keep going, a powerful quote can make all the difference. In our latest compilation, we've gathered 78 of the most impactful career quotes that can inspire progress, spark a positive mindset, and fuel your professional journey. Dive in and let these words of wisdom from industry leaders, visionaries, and thinkers guide you toward achieving your career aspirations.

1. “Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.” - Ayn Rand

2. “I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life'.” - Maya Angelou

3. “The first test of ability and intelligence is to find a field of endeavor in which profits are large and risks small.” - James Gould Cozzens

4. “Often people attempt to live their lives backwards, they try to have more things or more money in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are then do what you need to do in order to have what you want. ” - Margaret Young

5. “Begin somewhere. You cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.” - Liz Smith

6. “The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.” - Timothy Ferriss

7. “A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night” - Marilyn Monroe

8. “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

9. “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

10. “No, scratch the word "career." Careers are for people who wish to advance. I only want to survive, draw a paycheck. ” - Emily Giffin

11. “I worked for a menial’s hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have willingly paid.” - Jessie B. Rittenhouse

12. “When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.” - Napoleon Hill

13. “A world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said "What will you be? What will you do?" I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.” - Daniel Mason

14. “Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. “Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

16. “I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.” - Carl Sandburg

17. “Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape.” - Nigel Slater

18. “When one door closes another opens but all too often there is a long hallway in between. ” - Rick Jarow

19. “Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

20. “Now, it is frequently asserted that, with women, the job does not come first. What (people cry) are women doing with this liberty of theirs? What woman really prefers a job to a home and family? Very few, I admit. It is unfortunate that they should so often have to make the choice. A man does not, as a rule, have to choose. He gets both. Nevertheless, there have been women ... who had the choice, and chose the job and made a success of it. And there have been and are many men who have sacrificed their careers for women ... When it comes to a choice, then every man or woman has to choose as an individual human being, and, like a human being, take the consequences.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

21. “In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

22. “It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

23. “What you're really supposed to be doing is whatever makes your heart sing.” - Barbara Sher

24. “Every time you worry that you could get trapped in some kind of work you don't care about, you're dealing with the problem of meaningfulness. I guarantee that in the back of your mind is the thought that somehow you have to make a contribution to something, be acknowledged, do something that matters--or you're just fooling around.” - Barbara Sher

25. “Every time you have to make a choice about anything, think "Does this go toward or away from what I want?" Always choose what goes toward what you want.” - Barbara Sher

26. “Everybody needs a career manager."- Lady Macbeth” - Robert Lynn Asprin

27. “God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. (“Mad House”)” - Richard Matheson

28. “Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.” - Richard Matheson

29. “(Georgie) Two hundred years later and it's exactly the same thing. You want to spend every single moment with your children and still have a fulfilling life at work.” - Nancy Woodruff

30. “If I never got to make a living doing what I loved, I'd still do it--for fun and for free.” - Susan E. Isaacs

31. “After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.” - George Eliot

32. “what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an ‘appointment’) which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?” - George Eliot

33. “You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is—I wouldn’t give twopence for him’— here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers— ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.” - George Eliot

34. “I determine to render more and better service, each day, than I am being paid to render. Those that reach the top are the ones who are not content with doing only what is required of them.” - Og Mandino

35. “Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.” - Avi Steinberg

36. “Be careful what you get good at doin', cuz you'll be doin' it for the rest of your life.” - Gabrielle Hamilton

37. “I was very lucky to be offered a lovely piece of property to build a career on. I started building a house on it, but it wasn't necessarily a house I would want to live in. So I ripped down that house, and I worked with these great lumberjacks to build a really cool cabin—a place I want to drink whiskey in and hang out until the sun rises.” - Vanessa Carlton

38. “What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.” - Margaret Atwood

39. “If you're male, and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.” - Chuck Palahniuk

40. “Persistence. Perfection. Patience. Power. Prioritize your passion. It keeps you sane.” - Criss Jami

41. “Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth.” - Criss Jami

42. “Out of the current confusion of ideals and and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity.” - Matthew B. Crawford

43. “The main character, Gene Moore, is shown how much of his identity is wrapped up in his career and potential in that career. When he comes home from war no longer able to see himself as a baseball prospect, he isn't sure who he is. This is thoroughly reinforced every time one of his acquaintances identifies him by baseball or inquires about his status. How much of our identity and worth is wrapped up in our job title or the one we are aspiring to?” - Gary Moore

44. “I have dozens of loyal fans! Baker's dozens! …they come in thirteens.” - Felicia Day

45. “It's not that I want to work for Williams-Sonoma, per se, it's just that you guys have the money and I don't.” - FAXBoy

46. “If you can channel the best part of you that is bigger than yourself, where it’s not about your ego and not about getting ahead, then you can have fun and you aren’t jealous of others. You see other people's talent as another branch of your own. You can keep it rooted in joy. Life is long and there are plenty of opportunities to make mistakes. The point of it all is to learn.” - Ethan Hawke

47. “In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there’s no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.” - Les Claypool

48. “Friendship is not by force but by choice.You can never please everybody, he who aims to please everybody will end up pleasing nobody.” - Stella Oladiran

49. “Pitting your dream against someone else's is a fantastic way to get discouraged and depressed.” - Jon Acuff

50. “The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.” - C.S. Lewis

51. “The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

52. “Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.” - Thomas Merton

53. “Don't be in a hurry about finding your work in the world for yourself—you are not old enough to judge for yourself yet; but just look about you in the place you find yourself in, and try to make things a little better and honester there.” - Thomas Hughes

54. “You'll never know the the outcome unless you just go out there and just do it.” - Jonathan Anthony Burkett

55. “If you don't toot your own horn, don't complain that there's no music.” - Guy Kawasaki

56. “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

57. “For God's sakes, quit worrying about your next job. Just do the best you can at the job you have now, and the offers will come. And when they do, if you have confidence in yourself you don't have to feel that you can't turn it down if it isn't quite right for you because you fear you'll never get another offer. You will. Wait for the right opportunity, and turn down all the rest. It will make all the difference.” - Bo Schembechler

58. “Don't confuse having a career with having a life.” - Hillary Rodham Clinton

59. “Organizing one's life to respond to a threat one felt powerless about as a child can be a source of enormous inspiration.” - Linda Austin

60. “Imagination is pure potentiality for creation. We shouldn't submit it to the hourly wages we subject our time at work.” - Carlos Roche

61. “I‘m very aware that my personal life, my marriage, is the source of speculation and interest in the department and with the public. I can live with that. I’m also aware that my husband’s businesses, and his style of conducting his businesses, are also the source of speculation and interest. I have no particular problem with that. But I resent very much that my reputation and my husband’s character should be questioned this way. From the media, Commander, it’s to be expected, but not from my superior officer. Not from any member of the department I’ve served to the best of my ability. I want you to take note, Commander, that turning in my badge would be like cutting off my arm. But if it comes down to a choice between the job and my marriage, then I lose the arm.” - J.D. Robb

62. “And that may be [Helen Gurley] Brown’s most enlightened lesson: that sexual autonomy and fulfillment are inseparable from the autonomy and fulfillment that a woman gets from her career.” - Judith Thurman

63. “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

64. “Positive energy is your priceless life force. Protect it. Don't allow people to draw from your reserves; select friends who recharge your energies . . . I'm not asking you to cut people out of your life, but I am asking you to invest your time with people who will push you to be your best. Winners love to see other people win.” - Chalene Johnson

65. “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

66. “After a few months of talking with people and observing them, I realized that the traits of the successful fitness enthusiasts had everything in common with those of the high achievers I had spent years studying in business.” - Chalene Johnson

67. “Treat yourself like a fat person with aches and pains and a suitcase full of excuses, and good luck--you'll stay exactly where you are. Train like an athlete and, though you may not look like one now, you will become one.” - Chalene Johnson

68. “Most of the people I know who are having trouble finding their life work are somewhat passive in style. They wait for something good to happen to them rather than make strong positive moves.” - Thomas Moore

69. “Getting to this point hasn't always been easy; it took me years to really learn to silence my mind. But as you move through your career and your life, you will have to learn that if you're not what you do, then what you do has no business keeping you entertained at night.” - Kelly Cutrone

70. “What would you do if you weren't afraid?” - Sheryl Sandberg

71. “Done is better than perfect.” - Sheryl Sandberg

72. “We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.” - Sheryl Sandberg

73. “Fortune does favor the bold and you'll never know what you're capable of if you don't try.” - Sheryl Sandberg

74. “It's not only who you know but who knows you.” - Bianca Frazier

75. “You survived as a child because others helped to maintain your life. It continues to be true today, even when you think you are abandoned, rejected, neglected, and unloved: the tomatoes you eat sustain you, the crossing guard stops the traffic so you can get to the other side of the street, the dinner offered to you on clean white plates nourishes you, the paper on which these words are printed informs you. Noticed or ignored, this web of others protects and holds you and makes it possible for you to make a difference: to take what came to you as seed and pass it on as blossom, and what came as blossom and ripen it to fruit.” - Dawna Markova

76. “I don't have any babies or ambition. I have it all!” - Nan Little

77. “I love my career. It is a career. A difficult one that takes many hours and total dedication to my craft. It is also what I was born to do--tell stories and entertain.” - Michelle M. Pillow

78. “Tomorrow is yesterday’s excuse for today; now has no excuses.” - George Alexiou