Work Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

An investigator starts research in a new field with faith, a foggy idea, and a few wild experiments. Eventually the interplay of negative and positive results guides the work. By the time the research is completed, he or she knows how it should have been started and conducted.

Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.

Herman Melville

During the periods in my marriage when I chose to stay home with my kids rather than work as an attorney, it caused me no end of anxiety. Despite the fact that I knew I was contributing to our family by caring for our children, I still felt that my worth was less because I wasn't earning.

To be glad of life because it gives you to chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars- to be satisfied with your possessions but not content with yourself until you have made the best of them- to despise nothing in the world except falsehood and meanness, and to fear nothing except cowardice- to be governed by you admirations rather than by your disgusts- to covet nothing that is your neighbors except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners- to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends, and every day of Christ; to spend as much time as you can in God's out-of doors- these are the little guideposts on the footpaths to peace.

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

The law is bigger than money, but only if the law works hard enough.

Thomas E. Dewey

I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot; he got on his bike and looked for work and he kept looking 'til he found it.

Work has indeed been my best beauty treatment. I believe in hard work. It keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and the spirit.

Helena Rubinstein

Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.

Jacques Lipchitz

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Jean-François Lyotard

When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over

George MacDonald

My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.

I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. Very much alone in my work, I am almost jealous of it. Geography has no bearing on it, nor have the interests of the community in which I work.

If work was a good thing the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

A creative artist works on his next composition because he is not satisfied with his previous one. When he loses a critical attitude toward his own work, he ceases to be an artist.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him Vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God we call him Sportsman.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

R. G. Collingwood

Holding hands at midnight
'Neath a starry sky…
Nice work if you can get it,
And you can get it if you try.