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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"Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced . . . the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously . . . this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work. . . ."
"It's easier to change what you do than people think it is. If you don't change, your field changes around you."
"Work hard at work worth doing."
"Work is the true elixir of life. The busiest man is the happiest man. Excellence in any art or profession is attained only by hard and persistent work. Never believe that you are perfect. When a man imagines, even after years of striving, that he has attained perfection, his decline begins."
"The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces."
"Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data."
"Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder."
"No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society."
"I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place."
"If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting."
"The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it."
"My work is that of keeping every operation down (in size) so that the farmer and the man farthest down can get hold of it."
"I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right."
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."
"In Holman Hunt's painting, "The Light of the World, "Christ is shown in a garden at midnight, holding a lantern in His left hand. With His right hand He is knocking on a heavily paneled door. When the painting was unveiled, a critic remarked to the painter, "Mr. Hunt, the work is unfinished. There is no handle on the door." "That," Hunt answered, "is the door to the human heart. It can be opened only from the inside.""
"Work like you don't need the money."
"Retirement is the ugliest word in the language."
"Making a success of the job at hand is the best step toward the kind you want."
"Five years from now I see myself still working hard to get where I want to be, because I think big."
"The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work."
