Work Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature herself, as has been often said, requires that we should be able, not only to work well, but to use leisure well; for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end.

We 've wholly forgotten how to die. But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when to end.

Henry David Thoreau

Every noble work is bound to face problems and obstacles. It is important to check your goal and motivation thoroughly. One should be very truthful, honest, and reasonable. One's actions should be good for others, and for oneself as well. Once a positive goal is chosen, you should decide to pursue it all the way to the end. Even if it is not realized, at least there will be no regret.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

Simone de Beauvoir

Love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart; and remember that the true hope of the Noldor lieth in the West, and cometh from the Sea.

J. R. R. Tolkien

As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiencesof the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside of time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.

Henry David Thoreau

After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art.... In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics … neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. … the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

Prayer does not demand that we interrupt our work, but that we continue working as if it were a prayer.

All our dignity consists of thought. It is from there that we must be lifted up and not from space and time, which we could never fill. So let us work on thinking well. That is the principle of morality.

All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labor... Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything short- livedor local, but abode by real and abiding traits.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

God himself is not secure, having given man dominion over his work.

We shall make mistakes; and if we let these mistakes frighten us from our work we shall show ourselves weaklings.

Theodore Roosevelt

It is a palpable falsehood to say we can have specie for our paper whenever demanded. Instead, then, of yielding to the cries of scarcity of medium set up by speculators, projectors and commercial gamblers, no endeavors should be spared to begin the work of reducing it by such gradual means as may give time to private fortunes to preserve their poise, and settle down with the subsiding medium; and that, for this purpose, the States should be urged to concede to the General Government, with a saving of chartered rights, the exclusive power of establishing banks of discount for paper.

Thomas Jefferson

The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I think I made essentially a mistake in staying in movies but it's a mistake I can't regret because it's like saying I shouldn't have stayed married to that woman but I did because I love her. I would have been more successful if I hadn't been married to her, you know. I would have been more successful if I'd left movies immediately, stayed in the theatre, gone into politics, written, anything. I've wasted a greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. I'ts about two percent movie-making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.

Mannerism is always longing to have done, and has no true enjoyment in work. A genuine, really great talent, on the other hand, has its greatest happiness in execution.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

The attitude of Communists towards any person who has made mistakes in his work should be one of persuasion in order to help him change and start afresh and not one of exclusion, unless he is incorrigible.

Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive... Everything that is unattainable for us now will one day be near and clear... But we must work.

Christ says, 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.'

Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.

Charles Dickens

Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

Henry David Thoreau

In my life, there are two things I've found I'm very good at: overcoming obstacles and motivating good people to do their best work.