Work Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory, and besides were my love when I was a young man. Cauliflowers exemplify a second area of great simplicity, that of shapes which appear more or less the same as you look at them up close or from far away, as you zoom in and zoom out.
Before my work, those shapes had no use, hence no word was needed to denote them. My work created such a need and I coined "fractals."

Benoît Mandelbrot

The rise of National Socialism is the protest of a people against a State that denies the right to work. If the machinery for distribution in the present economic system of the world is incapable of properly distributing the productive wealth of nations, then that system is false and must be altered. The important part of the present development is the anti-capitalist sentiment that is permeating our people.

Gregor Strasser

Love has the quality of informing almost everything — even one's work.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Are these the choice dishes the Doctor has sent us?
Is this the great poet whose works so content us?
This Goldsmith's fine feast, who has written fine books?
Heaven sends us good meat, but the Devil sends cooks.

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

Maria Montessori

Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god.

Constantin Brâncuși

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.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

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

Jacques Lipchitz

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything.

Thomas Love Peacock

The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, ahistorical accidents, soon forgotten.

Do you mortify; do you make it your daily work; be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

George Edward Woodberry

If faith produce no works, I see That faith is not a living tree. Thus faith and works together grow, No separate life they never can know. They're soul and body, hand and heart, What God hath joined, let no man part.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us

Robert Smithson

Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death. I can work out a good character much faster than anyone can lie me out of it.

It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character... So much the better if it is painful for you to take even the first step, the more toilsome the work, the stronger you will emerge from it... I repeat, guard against facility.

Camille Pissarro

We shall continue to work for a Middle East that is free of strife and violence, living in harmony without the threat of terrorism or dangers of weapons of mass destruction.

O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.

Phillips Brooks

A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.

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

A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.