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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"I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim."
"Fortune cannot aid those who do nothing."
"Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good."
"A champion of the workingman has never been known to die of overwork."
"Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others."
"Always focus on your effort, instead of the results of that effort."
"I was so lucky that I didn't have anyone to copy, be impressed by. I had developed my own style, I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work until I was around thirty."
"When the effective leader is finished with his work, the people say it happened naturally."
"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."
"Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines."
"Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes."
"It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done."
"I think the way it works is that when you're casting a movie, you usually want to work with people that you believe in."
"Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished."
"Unraveling the web of Penelope."
"People think that at the top there isn't much room. They tend to think of it as an Everest. My message is that there is tons of room at the top."
"I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. . . . I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally."
"If we do not like our work, and do not try to get happiness out of it, we are a menace to our profession as well as to ourselves."
"A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul."
"The boatmen appeared to lead an easy and contented life, and we thought that we should prefer their employment ourselves to many professions which are much more sought after. They suggested how few circumstances are necessary to the well-being and serenity of man, how indifferent all employments are, and that any may seem noble and poetic to the eyes of men, if pursued with sufficient buoyancy and freedom."
