Work Quotes

Abraham Lincoln:

My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems.

Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912


Barbara Ehrenreich:

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

Christina Rossetti:

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes; work never begun.

Colleen C. Barrett:

When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.

Colleen C. Barrett:

Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.

Danilo Dolci:

It's important to know that words don't move mountains. Work, exacting work moves mountains.

Edward Kennedy:

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die.

Emily Dickinson:

What is—"Paradise"—
Who live there—
Are they "Farmers"—
Do they "hoe"—
Do they know that this is "Amherst"—
And that I—am coming—too—

This entry continued ...

Francoise de Motteville:

The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find in it our pleasure.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

Frederick Douglass:

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

Gloria Steinem:

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

Helen Keller:

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Henri-Frederic Amiel:

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.

Henry David Thoreau:

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight, / But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night.

John W. Gardner:

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Jonas Salk:

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.

Lane Kirkland:

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.

Lena Horne:

Always be smarter than the people who hire you.

Lou Erickson:

Gardening requires lots of water -- most of it in the form of perspiration.

Lya Sorano:

When we talk about equal pay for equal work, women in the workplace are beginning to catch up. If we keep going at this current rate, we will achieve full equality in about 475 years. I don't know about you, but I can't wait that long.

Marian Wright Edelman:

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

Mark Twain:

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

The Roots of Violence:
Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles.

Orson Scott Card:

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

Pearl S. Buck:

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Pearl S. Buck:

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

Phyllis McGinley:

The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

Rita Mae Brown:

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Rita Mae Brown:

I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain.

Rudyard Kipling:

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: -- "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.

Sam Donaldson:

The truth is, when I got started in this business, it wasn't because I had a full understanding of the importance of the business, but because I thought it was fun. I found it exciting. It fulfilled me, whatever it was that I was looking for.

Sara Ann Friedman:

What we do matters to us. Work may not be the most important thing in our lives or the only thing. We may work because we must, but we still want to love, to feel pride in, to respect ourselves for what we do and to make a difference.

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn:

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
[from "Through the Needle's Eye," 1916]

Stephen Jay Gould:

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910


Thomas Alva Edison:

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Alva Edison:

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

Thomas Alva Edison:

Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas Jefferson:

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

Vaclav Havel:

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Victor Hugo:

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

Vince Lombardi:

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

Vince Lombardi:

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

Winston Churchill:

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.