Quotes, aphorisms and phrases about working, or about exercising a productive activity using your own intellectual and manual knowledge and skills in order to obtain compensation.
Quotes about working
- Work makes days prosperous, wine makes Sundays happy. (Charles Pierre Baudelaire)
- The artist is an exception: his leisure is a job and his job a rest. (Katherine Pancol)
- Success is finding something you enjoy doing, getting paid to do it, and finding someone to share it with. (Dick Clark)
- Those who have a lot to do do not have time to indulge in debauchery. Without a doubt, work erases the vices generated by idleness. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- The only way to do a great job is to love what you do. (Steve Jobs)
- Every job is good if you do your best and do your best. A hard working man only stinks for those who have nothing else to do but smell. (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
- There is no real wealth other than human work. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
- Temperance and work are the two true doctors of man: work sharpens the appetite and temperance prevents abuse. (Jean Jacques Rousseau)
- In free, creative, participatory and supportive work, the human being expresses and increases the dignity of his life. (Pope francesco)
- When work is a pleasure, life is beautiful. But when life is imposed on us it is a bondage. (Maksim Gorky)
Recommended readings- Travel phrases: aphorisms for those who have to leave
- Human rights phrases: aphorisms and short quotes
- Phrases about being yourself: quotes, aphorisms
- Phrases about indifference: aphorisms, quotes
- Formal excuses: sentences to apologize
- The coinage of wisdom is knowing that the rest is rust, and that real life is found in love, laughter, and work. (Elbert Green Hubbard)
- Being able to take pride in one's job means much more than a gymnasium, tennis courts and leisure areas. (William Edwards Deming)
- It is terrible to pretend that what is second is first quality. Pretend you don't need love when you have it. Or that you like your job when you know you are very capable of doing something else. (Doris May Lessing)
- Work keeps us away from three great evils: boredom, vice and need. (Voltaire)
- You cannot increase peace and goodwill in the world if you cannot create an atmosphere of harmony and love where you live and work. (Thomas Dreier)
- Do not pray for an easy life. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your strength. Pray for strength equal to your homework. Then doing your job won't have to be a miracle, but you will be the miracle. (Phillips Brooks)
- We know that work has always sweetened life: the fact is that not everyone likes sweets. (Victor Hugo)
- Plan your work and work on your plan. Decide in advance how exactly you intend to get from where you are to where you intend to go. (Brian Tracy)
- Your profession is not what makes you take your wages home. Your profession is what you have been brought into the world to carry out with such passion and intensity that it becomes spiritual in its call. (Vincent Van Gogh)
- We live in the age of too much work and little education; in the age when people are hardworking enough to become completely stupid. (Oscar Wilde)
- I make my living dreaming. (Steven Spielberg)
- The man who is ashamed of his work cannot have respect for himself. (Bertrand Russell)
- Work is a duty and a man must not receive a salary in proportion to what he produces, but in proportion to his virtue which is expressed in zeal. (Bertrand Russel)
- The supreme luck of a man is that of being born for some activity that sees him busy and happy, whether it is to make baskets, or swords, or canals, or statues, or songs. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- The secret to enjoying your job is to have a pastime that is even worse. (Bill Watterson)
- The supreme luck of a man is that of being born for some activity that sees him busy and happy, whether it is to make baskets, or swords, or canals, or statues, or songs. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- To make a man happy, fill his hands with work, his heart with affection, his mind with a purpose, his memory with useful knowledge, his future with hope, and his stomach with food. (Frederick Evan Crane)
- Work is what you do for others, art is what you do for yourself. (Stephen Sondheim)
- They threatened me with lung cancer, and still smoke and smoke.If only they threatened me with hard work, I could quit. (Mignon Mclaughlin)
- If you do the wrong job after maybe they won't make you do it anymore. (Bill Watterson)
- A vocation means having one's passion by profession. (Stendhal)
- Work has become, with the bourgeoisie, work that transforms historical conditions. (Guy Debord)
- Men have to work and women get married for money. It is a horribly unfair world. (Louisa May Alcott)
- The profession of all those who sell fatigue and their industry must be considered as something low and vile, since anyone who offers his work for money sells to himself and puts himself at the level of slaves. (Guide)
Aphorisms on working
- The key to success is to feel that your 'job' is a 'game.' You don't work to 'earn a living', or to fill your time, or because society, your family or your parents expect that you do it. You work because it's the best game there is, the only one where you can get paid to do what's fun. (Michael Korda)
- Most of the smart people work for someone else. (Chris Anderson)
- I like work, it fascinates me: I can spend hours and hours watching people working. I like to keep it next to me; and the idea of getting rid of it almost breaks my heart. (Jerome Klapka Jerome)
- The real question is: work cannot be a law without being a right. (Victor Hugo)
- Laziness, like rust, consumes faster than the work is worn out, while the key that is used is always shiny. (Benjamin Franklin)
- Men not only want an occupation by which to earn a living, but the possibility of following their vocation. (Sandor Marai)
- The purpose of the job is to earn free time. (Aristotle)
- Success is a good side effect, but what I'm interested in is working. (Juliette Lewis)
- All the work that elevates humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with scrupulous excellence. (Martin Luther King)
- If you love your job you will never have worked one day in your life. (Tommy Lasorda)
- Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose it. Panic when your wife also loses it. (Boris Makaresko)
- When a community is nothing but a workplace it is in danger. (Jean Vanier)
- Those who work while sitting are paid more than those who work while standing. (Ogden Nash)
- Work is the constant search for the meaning of life, as well as for daily bread. (Studs Terkel)
- Don't worry about not having a place; rather worry about making yourself capable of it. Don't worry about not being known; rather worry about making yourself worthy. (Confucius)
- I am continually in the crossfire of people who don't understand my job, and people who don't understand their own. (Norman Sgrò)
- Be able to do more things than you are doing now. Let everyone know that you have reservations in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too big for the post you now occupy, you are too small for it. (James Abram Garfield)
- I don't believe in career, but in work. (Debra Winger)
- Find a job you like and you will have five more days for each week. (H. Jackson Brown Jr)
- Even if you don't achieve success it is important that you do what you love, because it makes you much happier than fame and wealth. (Tony Hawk)
- Work is the refuge of those who have nothing better to do. (Oscar Wilde)
- Work is life you know, and without that there is only fear and insecurity. (John Lennon)
- There is no job that a man can do that is not dignified - if he does it right. (Bill Cosby)
- Continuous work and application are the food of my spirit. When I begin to seek rest, then I will stop living. (Francesco Petrarca)
- A working person should also have time to refresh himself, be with the family, have fun, read, listen to music, play a sport. When an activity leaves no room for healthy recreation, restorative rest, then it becomes slavery. (Pope francesco)
- I believe in work, hard work, and long hours of work. Men do not collapse from overwork, but from worry and exhaustion. (Charles Evans Hughes)
- An ecclesiastic is one who feels called to live without working at the expense of the wretched who work to live. (Voltaire)
- Home is the place where I work, and I work anywhere. (Alfred Bernhard Nobel)
- We can live a wonderful life in the world if we know how to work and love, work for those we love and love what we work for. (Lev Tolstoj)
- Keep your job in hand, or he'll hold you in hand. (Benjamin Franklin)
- They consider me crazy because I don't want to sell my days in exchange for gold.And I judge them crazy because they think my days have a price. (Khalil Gibran)
- There can be no joy in life without the joy of work. (St. Thomas Aquinas)
- Pray as if everything depended on God. Work as if everything depended on you. (Saint Ignatius Of Loyola)
Phrases about working
- Therefore the worker only outside of work feels close to himself, and feels outside of himself in work. (Karl Marx)
- It has happened so in all the epochs of the world that some have worked and others have, without work, enjoyed a large part of the fruits. This is wrong, and must not continue. (Abraham Lincoln)
- Profit is the natural consequence of a job well done. (Henry Ford)
- The beginning is the most important part of the job. (Plato)
- Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanity. (Sigmund Freud)
- Work consists of whatever the body is forced to do ... play consists of anything the body is not forced to do. (Mark Twain)
- If you are not in love with what you are doing, don't do it; look for what you love. (Ray Bradbury)
- Communism does not deprive anyone of the power to appropriate social products; it only takes away the power to subjugate the work of others through this appropriation. (Karl Marx)
- Moderate work strengthens the spirit; and weakens it when it is excessive: just as moderate water feeds the plants and too much drowns them. (Putarco)
- Nowadays, the worst part of the job is what happens to people when they stop working. (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
- A paradox of working life is that the same reality can be perceived by one person as a devastating threat, and by another as an invigorating stimulus. (Daniel Goleman)
- When a man tells you that he has become rich thanks to hard work, ask him: Whose? (Don Marquis)
- Each man is given a job that only he can do. (Susan Elisabeth Blow)
- You have to love what you do to want to do it every day. (Aaliyah)
- Work ennobles man and enriches someone else. (Michelangelo)
- Laziness may sound attractive, but work gives you satisfaction. (Anne Frank)
- Those who have a job work too much, while others starve without wages. (Bertrand Russel)
- One of the symptoms of the arrival of a nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is tremendously impressive. If I were a doctor, I would prescribe a vacation to all patients who consider their work important. (Bertrand Russell)
- Pleasure in work adds perfection to the task we do. (Aristotle)
- The most important things to be happy in this life are having something to do, something to love and something to hope for. (Joseph Addison)
- Whenever asked if you can do a job, answer: Of course I can! Then get busy and find out how to do it. (Teddy Roosevelt)
- On Monday you justify yourself with the work you do. But on Sunday what excuse do you have? Horrendous Sunday, enemy of humanity! (Saul Bellow)
- Love, work and knowledge are the source of our life. They should also rule it. (Wilhelm Reich)
- If you believe in what you are doing, then don't let anything distract you from your work. Much of the best work in the world has been done against impossible evidence. The trick is to do the job. (Dale Carnegie)
- It is the job that never starts what takes the longest to finish. (J.R.R.Tolkien)
- Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to make a living with it. (Albert Einstein)
- If one spent a whole year on vacation, having fun would be as stressful as working. (William Shakespeare)
- Be wary when a man's job becomes more important than his goals, when the man disappears behind his duties. (John Harington)
- Work is like a pole: it has two ends. If you work for someone who understands it, you give it qualities, but if you do it for a fool, just content the eye. (Aleksandr Isaevic Solzhenitsyn)
- Professionalism lies in knowing how to do it, when to do it, and in doing it. (Frank Tyger)
- So I became a journalist. I hated doing it but I couldn't find an honest job. (Mark Twain)
- The best hobby is the one that distracts us most from our main occupation. (Charlotte Rampling)
- The longer the title, the less important the job. (George McGovern)
- Get happiness from your job or you may never know what happiness is. (Elbert Green Hubbard)
- Don't take your job too seriously. Don't take life too seriously. (Mick Jagger)
