Work quotes
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside work — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."
"Labor is the great source from which nearly all, if not all, human comforts and necessities are drawn."
"Little things affect little minds."
"I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat."
"Emphasize strengths, don't fix weaknesses."
"I never hesitated to promote someone I didn't like. The comfortable assistant - the nice guy you like to go on fishing trips with - is a great pitfall. Instead I looked for those sharp, scratchy, harsh, almost unpleasant guys who see and tell you about things as they really are. If you can get enough of them around you, and have patience enough to hear them out, there is no limit to where you can go."
"The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort."
"No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil."
"The worst days of those who enjoy what they do are better than the best days of those who don't."
"Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid."
"The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great."
"How hard you work matters more than how much you make."
"I am exhausted if I don't work."
"The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem."
"Always do one thing less than you think you can do."
"Whatever there is of God and goodness in the universe, it must work itself out and express itself through us. We cannot stand aside and let God do it."
"I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me."
"Nothing worth having comes easy."
"He that can work is born to be king of something."
"Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives."
