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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"We've ceased making progress at the top in any industry anywhere in the world . In the United States, women have had 14% of the top corporate jobs and 17% of the board seats for 10 years. Ten years of no progress."
"Every woman I know, particularly the senior ones, has been called too aggressive at work. We know in gender blind studies that men are more aggressive in their offices than women. We know that. Yet we're busy telling all the women that they're too aggressive. That's the issue."
"The things that hold women back, hold them back from sitting at the boardroom table and they hold women back from speaking at the PTA meeting."
"In those same 10 years, women are getting more and more of the graduate degrees, more and more of the undergraduate degrees, and it's translating into more women in entry-level jobs, even more women in lower-level management. But there's absolutely been no progress at the top. You can't explain away 10 years. Ten years of no progress is no progress."
"I spent most of my career, including my time at McKinsey, never acknowledging that I was a woman. And, you know, fast forward - I'm 43 now - fitting in is not helping us."
"I just believed. I believed that the technology would change people's lives. I believed putting real identity online - putting technology behind real identity - was the missing link."
"I am saying that I was able to mold those hours around the needs of my family, and that matters. And I really encourage other people at Facebook to mold hours around themselves."
"A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it."
"The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill."
"A classical education enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving."
"Enlightenment, the old teachers say, adds nothing, except maybe the recognition of a need for and a commitment to the work that still needs to be done."
"There will be little drudgery in this better ordered world. Natural power harnessed in machines will be the general drudge. What drudgery is inevitable will be done as a service and duty for a few years or months out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the whole life of anyone."
"Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it."
"The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way."
"The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done."
"A mathematician of the first rank, Laplace quickly revealed himself as only a mediocre administrator; from his first work we saw that we had been deceived. Laplace saw no question from its true point of view; he sought subtleties everywhere; had only doubtful ideas, and finally carried the spirit of the infinitely small into administration."
"[It] is impossible for us to establish a living vital connection with the masses unless we will work for them, through them and in their midst, not as their patrons but as their servants."
"Practice non-action. Work without doing."
"The Tao of the sage is work without effort."
"If you want to accord with the Tao, just do your job, then let go."
