Working Quotes

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
― Mark Twain

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
― Audre Lorde

“If money’s the god people worship, I’d rather go worship the devil instead.”
― Jess C Scott, Rockstar

“The life so short, the craft so long to learn.”
― Hippocrates

“I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.”
― Yann Martel

“Many like to suffer, and for some, suffering can be a kind of artistic expression that challenges people and defies them with their limits, and, so, pain can be a shot to recognize the architecture and the workings of their being. (“ Rooting, hogging or... dying”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.”
― Queen Elizabeth I of England

“There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical but whose growth is based on industry, jobs. Detroit has its natural attractions: lakes all over the place, an abundance of trees and four distinct seasons for those who like variety in their weather, everything but hurricanes and earth-quakes. But it’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.”
― Elmore Leonard

“كم هم محظوظون إذ يحرقون الفائض من أرواحهم في العمل، بدل أن يحترق في داخلهم بدون سبب، و يؤذيهم.”
― محمد حسن علوان, طوق الطهارة

“[Poem: Slates of Grey]

Sullen faces like slates of grey—
What I’d seen on a walk today.

Bodies rushing bodies bolting
Time for life a disregarding.

Money to make and to grow old
What about the hands to hold?

Deadlines, projects, people to meet
What about our own two feet.

Sullen faces like slates of grey...
What I’d see most anyday.”
― Jess C Scott, Trouble

“It was ironic, but when you scratched the surface, most successful men were working for one thing only--to retire--and the sooner the better. Whereas women were the complete opposite. She had never heard a woman say she was working so she could retire to a desert island or to live on a boat. It was probably, she thought, because most women didn't think they deserved to do nothing.”
― Candace Bushnell, Lipstick Jungle

“I find it a challenge to cooperate in a society where it's considered moral to critique a résumé yet immoral to critique morality.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“If you don’t take the time to get really clear about exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish, then you’re forever doomed to spend your life achieving the goals of those who do.”
― Steve Pavlina

“If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Clockers" asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart?

(Hornby's thoughts after reading "Clockers" by Richard Price)”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

“Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now.”
― Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading 2

“The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

“The problem is that those of us who are lucky enough to do work that we love are sometimes cursed with too damn much of it.”
― Terry Gross, All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists

“Let your autobiography contain these words; "I was able to think positively, love affectionately and work efficiently". Thinking, loving and working are what make us different from animals and trees.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Your most important “want” should be the one you can control!”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.”
― John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

“Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didn’t want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didn’t feel so good today.”
― Rollo Romig

“The greatest ideas are the simplest. Now there was something to be done they worked with passion”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“What is working stain, does not soil.”
― Edmundo de Amicis

“My time on the financial desk had become a slow ordeal of waiting for my superiors to discover more and more of how little I knew about what I was doing; and now however pathetically willing I might be to learn all the things I was supposed to know, it had become much too ludicrously late to ask.”
― Richard Yates, The Collected Stories

“A person’s work allows their character to form and provides a creative outlet for their inner world of imaginative thoughts and creative impulses. A person whom fails to find suitable work that allows their soul room to grow will quickly begin eroding into a withered and desiccated being.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“When you do physical labor, you end up being no longer useful when your physical condition deteriorates. However hard I work, however dependable I am, when my body grows old then no doubt I too will be a worn-out part, ready to be replaced, no longer of any use to the convenience store.”
― Sayaka Murata, コンビニ人間 [Konbini ningen]

“Her husband had pursued an “alternative lifestyle” that was “free of the fetters of capitalism.” The woman herself, when she was in college, had considered the conformist pressures of getting good grades, building a resume, and landing a job in some big corporation to be tedious and distasteful and had thought the life her husband wanted dovetailed with hers. They got married as soon as she graduated, and she got a job right after. She learned quickly that an “alternative lifestyle” meant nothing without a detailed, concrete plan, and living “free of the fetters of capitalism” meant working for places that didn’t pay their workers on time. As she worried about realizing this alternative lifestyle in the real world, she crumbled away under the pressures of working at a company in the non-profit sector that was run not by the normal labor of workers, but through their unrequited sacrifices. Meanwhile, her husband, who was her upperclassman in college but graduated later than she did, fiddled around in search of his ideal “alternative lifestyle” without ever settling down on any particular profession—the result being the twenty-million-won loan he had taken out and used up without her knowledge.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny