Work Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

Set exorbitant standards, and give your people hell when they don't live up to them. There is nothing so demoralizing as a boss who tolerates second rate work.

True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person.

Much advance publicity was made for the address the Master would deliver on The Destruction of the World and a large crowd gathered at the monastery grounds to hear him.
The address was over in less than a minute. All he said was:
"These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness."

Anthony de Mello

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

The Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German health service are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to one hundred. At best an education which produces useful coolies for us is admissible. Every educated person is a future enemy.

- Report...

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

Often attributed to Thomas Edison

What is called a sincere work [of art] is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.

The recompense and the ambition of a scientist is to conquer the approbation of his peers and of the masters whom he venerates. It would seem to me that I was committing a theft if I were to let one day go by without doing some work.

An aching head and trembling limbs, which are the inevitable effects of drinking, disincline the hands from work.

George Washington

It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.

G. K. Chesterton

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Ernest Hemingway

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave; and success and miscarriage are empty sounds.

Neither the naked hand nor the understanding, left to itself, can do much; the work is accomplished by instruments and helps, of which the need is not less for the understanding than the hand.

Usurpers always bring about or select troublous times to get passed, under cover of the public terror, destructive laws, which the people would never adopt in cold blood. The moment chosen is one of the surest means of distinguishing the work of the legislator from that of the tyrant.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm's time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?

I have no doubt that the Romans planned the time-table of their days far better than we do. They rose before the sun at all seasons. Except in wartime we never see the dawn. Sometimes we see sunset. The message of sunset is sadness; the message of dawn is hope. The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two.

Winston Churchill

Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a soldier should be well done.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.

Peace can endure only so long as humanity really insists upon it, and is willing to work for it and sacrifice for it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form... they shall do so under absolutely truthful representations... Great corporations exist only because they were created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.

Theodore Roosevelt