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Quotes about work

220 quotes from 151 people

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Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.
Elbert Hubbard1856–1915
- Happiness
I do not like work even when someone else does it.
Mark Twain1835–1910The Lost Napoleon
For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than agriculture.
Cicero107–43 BCDe Officiis – On Duties (44 BC), Book I, section 151. Translation by Cyrus R. Edmonds (1873), p. 73
Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and… Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Mark Twain1835–1910The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ch. 2, p. 32In context
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
Mark Twain1835–1910Letter to an Unidentified Person (1908)
- Talking
Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
Karl Marx1818–1883Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867), Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 1, p. 257.
- Economics
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862Life Without Principle (1863), p. 485
- Business
It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862Letter to Harrison Blake (November 16, 1857)
Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Human, All Too Human (1878), Aphorism 283, tr. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann
- Freedom
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
Robert Frost1874–1963A Boy’s Will (1913, 1915), Mowing
- Facts
Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881Signs of the Times (1829)
- Responsibility
Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.
Joseph Addison1672–1719The Spectator (1711–1714), No. 112 (9 July 1711)
- Religion
Labor in this country is independent and proud. It has not to ask the patronage of capital, but capital solicits the aid of labor.
Daniel Webster1782–1852Speech (2 April 1824); reported in Edward Everett, ed., The Works of Daniel Webster (1851), volume iii, page 141
- Economics
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778II
- Thinking
Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor.
Alexis de Tocqueville1805–1859Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XVIII.