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Quotes about work

220 quotes from 151 people

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A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing day after day without repeating himself.
Charles M. Schulz1922–2000You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown! (1985)
- Art
I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.
J. D. Salinger1919–2010Statements to New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh, as quoted in Salinger: A Biography (2000) by Paul Alexander
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
David Graeber1961–2020Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, “Age of the Great Capitalist Empires”, p. 350
- Economics
Hopelessness isn’t the same as happiness, but it’s enough to make the employees stop complaining, and that’s a good start.
Scott Adams1957–2026Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook (1996)
- Comedy
Continued work and application form my soul’s nourishment. So soon as I commenced to rest and relax I should cease to live.
Petrarch1304–1374Letter to Boccaccio (28 April 1373), in Robinson and Rolfe, Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (1898)
The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.
Ezra Pound1885–1972New Age, March 30, 1922. As quoted in Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization edited by Noel Stock, 1960
- Art
Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you derive from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.
MKMichael Kordaborn 1933Success! (1977), p. 145
- Success
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
MOMary Oliver1935–2019Blue Pastures (1995)
- Art
Toil conquered the world, unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is hard.
Virgil70–19 BCGeorgics (29 BC), Book I, lines 145–146 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough).
Learn fortitude and toil from me, my son,
Ache of true toil. Good fortune learn from others.
Virgil70–19 BCAeneid (29–19 BC), Book XII, Lines 435–436 (tr. Robert Fitzgerald)
- Courage
- Luck
It was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.
Zinedine Zidaneborn 1972Interview, 2004
Everyone’s like, ‘overnight sensation.’ It’s not overnight. It’s years of hard work.
Margot Robbieborn 1990Chris Lee, “Margot Robbie’s careful ‘overnight sensation’ plan”, Los Angeles Times (11 January 2014)
- Success
Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865Reply to the New York Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association (21 March 1864); Collected Works, Vol. 7, pp. 259-260
- Economics
I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862Life Without Principle (1863), pp. 486–7
- Time
You must get your living by loving.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862Life Without Principle (1863), pp. 486–7
- Love