Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer

drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.

Mortimer Adler, in A Vision of the Future : Twelve Ideas for a Better Life and a Better
Society (1984)
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve
immortality through not dying.
Woody Allen, as quoted in Silent Strength (1990) by Lloyd John Ogilvie, p. 111
And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more messiah than you. The river
delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this
adventure."
Richard Bach, in Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
Richard Bach, in Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.
You may have to work for it, however.
Richard Bach, in Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
J. M. Barrie, as quoted in The new dictionary of thoughts: a Cyclopedia of Quotations
(1930) edited by Tryon Edwards, C. N. Catrevas, Jonathan Edwards, and Ralph Emerson
Browns
Job: A state of employment everyone wants but few look forward to on a Monday
morning: a demanding mate that frequently kills those who cannot love it.
Rick Bayan, The Cynic’s Dictionary (1994)
You can pay workers to work, but you can’t pay them to love it.
Rick Bayan, in Rick's Notebook : "Work" (August 2000), at The Cynic’s Sanctuary
website
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're
doing is work or play.
Warren Beatty, as quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever : Why The Left Is Right (2004)
by William Martin, p. 213
Work is healthy, you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. It is not
work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.
Henry Ward Beecher, as quoted in The Teachers' Institute, Vol. 18, No. 1 (September
1895), p. 16
When God wanted sponges and oysters, He made them and put one on a rock and
the other in the mud. When He made man, He did not make him to be a sponge or
an oyster; He made him with feet and hands, and head and heart, and vital blood,
and a place to use them, and He said to him, Go Work.
Henry Ward Beecher, in Royal Truths (1862), p. 21
Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven't
planted.
David Bly, as quoted in Peace of Mind : Daily Meditations for Easing Stress (1995) by
Amy Dean, p. 187
Work to me is a sacred thing.
Margaret Bourke-White, in Portrait of Myself (1963), Ch. 30
I slip from workaholic to bum real easy.
Matthew Broderick, as quoted in Pooped Puppies : Life's Too Short To Work Like A Dog
(2004), edited by Robin Haywood, p. 6
Work — other people's work — is an intolerable idea to a cat. Can you picture cats
herding sheep or agreeing to pull a cart? They will not inconvenience themselves
to the slightest degree.
Louis J. Camuti, as quoted in On the Art of Business (2004) by James H Merkel and
Abdul Wahad Al-Falaij, p. 257
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind —
honest work, which you intend getting done.
Thomas Carlyle, in On the Choice of Books : The Inaugural Address of Thomas Carlyle,
Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh (1866)
There's a time when you have to separate yourself from what other people expect
of you, and do what you love. Because if you find yourself 50 years old and you
aren't doing what you love, then what's the point?
Jim Carrey, as quoted in A Touch of Class (2003) by Carol Vanderheyden, p. 70
The nice thing about teamwork is that you always have others on your side.
Margaret Carty
Remember, work, well done, does good to the man who does it. It makes him a
better man.
George S. Clason, in The Richest Man in Babylon (1930)
Work is the Rent we pay for our time on Earth.
Tubby Clayton, Anglican clergyman, as quoted by David Frost in an interview in Saga
magazine (January 2009)
Though thousands of people indulge themselves in it regularly, and even develop a
taste for it, there is no doubt in my mind (and that of scientists whom I employ to
prove it) that Work is a dangerous and destructive drug, and should be called by its
right name, which is Fatigue.
Robertson Davies, in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)
I spent a busy day today, but got little done. This is because I am at last becoming
perfect in the art of seeming busy, even when very little is going on in my head or
under my hands. This is an art which every man learns, if he does not intend to
work himself to death.
Robertson Davies, in The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949)
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to
create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
Bette Davis, in The Lonely Life : An Autobiography (1962)
Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
Bette Davis, as quoted in The Quotable Woman, 1800-1975 (1977) by Elaine Partnow, p.
315
Arbeit macht frei.
Work makes (one) free.
Title of a 1873 novel by Lorenz Diefenbach, which became an infamous slogan above the
gates of several Nazi concentration camps.
The phrase "work-life balance" tells us that people think that work is the opposite
of life. We should be talking about life-life balance.
Patrick Dixon, in Building a Better Business (2005) p. 182
No problem is insurmountable. With a little courage, teamwork and determination
a person can overcome anything.
B. Dodge
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks
like work.
Thomas Edison, as quoted in An Enemy Called Average (1990) by John L. Mason, p. 55
Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or
accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system,
planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do
is not doing.
Thomas Edison, as quoted in Ford Times, Vol. 6, (1912), p. 136
I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-
five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours — and thrived
on it.
 Thomas Edison, diary entry quoted in Defending and Parenting Children Who Learn
Differently : Lessons from Edison's Mother (2007) by Scott Teel, p. 12
There is no substitute for hard work.
Thomas Edison
Everything comes to he who hustles while he waits.
Thomas Edison
Great ideas originate in the muscles.
Thomas Edison
Every individual should have the opportunity to develop the gifts which may be
latent in him. Alone in that way can the individual obtain the satisfaction to which
he is justly entitled; and alone in that way can the community achieve its richest
flowering. For everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the
individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein, as quoted in Educational Trends : Journal of Research and
Interpretation (June 1936), p. 32
If A equals success, then the formula is: A equals X plus Y plus Z. X is work. Y is
play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
Albert Einstein, as quoted in Kiplinger's Personal Finance, Vol. 11, No. 7 (July 1957), p.
48
Variant: If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, X is work. Y is play.
Z is keep your mouth shut.
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nominalist and Realist" in Essays: Second Series (1844)
If you behave as if the meaning of our life consisted in being able to work so many
hours a day, you rake away from all sick people the right to live and the
justification for their existence.
Viktor Frankl
Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together
is success.
Henry Ford
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to
reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place
in a portion of reality, in the human community.
Sigmund Freud
People have been known to achieve more as a result of working with others than
against them.
Allan Fromme, as quoted in "Allan Fromme, Psychologist And Writer, 87" in The New
York Times (2 February 2003)
The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let
them.
Robert Frost, as quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) edited
by Herbert Victor Prochnow
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the
morning, and does not stop until you get into the office.
Robert Frost
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than
work.
Robert Frost
My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the
work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group;
there was much less competition.
Indira Gandhi, as quoted in Taking Charge : Every Woman's Action Guide to Personal,
Political and Professional Success (1996) by Joan Steinau Lester, p. 76
Lose this day loitering, 'Twill be the same story Tomorrow — and the next more
dilatory. Then indecision brings its own delays, and days are lost lamenting
overdays! Are you ernest? Seize this very minute! What you can do, or dream you
can — begin it! Courage has genius, power and magic in it. Only engage, and the
mind grows heated. Begin it, and the work will be completed.
Goethe
It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life — those who work the hardest,
who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable
things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest people.
Brutus Hamilton
If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he
didn't get.
Bill Haywood, in Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood (1983) by Peter
Carlson, p. 146
Paraphrased variant: For every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone
else sweated to produce a dollar he never received.
Experience is an asset of which no worker can be cheated, no matter how selfish or
greedy his immediate employer may be.
Napoleon Hill
I believe that the best way to prepare for a Future Life is to be kind, live one day at
a time, and do the work you can do best, doing it as well as you can.
Elbert Hubbard, in "Credo", as published in A Message to Garcia, and Thirteen Other
Things (1901), p. 6
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work
of one extraordinary man.
Elbert Hubbard, in A Thousand and One Epigrams (1911)
If you want work well done, select a busy man ‚ the other kind has no time.
Elbert Hubbard, in The Note Book (1927)
The philosopher bent on the enlargement of experience perceives at once that his
work cannot be done, cannot even be commenced, until he has cleared away the
heaps of verbal detritus under which the bedrocks of experience lie buried.
L. P. Jacks, in The Usurpation Of Language (1910)
We are the children of an age which spends the best energies of its life in the
discussion of life, in an atmosphere of deferred fulfillment, continually postponing
the act of living to the work of mentally preparing to live.
L. P. Jacks, in The Usurpation Of Language (1910)
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his
play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his
recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of
excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether
he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
L. P. Jacks, in Education through Recreation (1932), p. 1
Work and play they're never okay to mix
Jimmy Eat World taken from their song "Work"
Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a
company work, a society work, a civilization work.
Vince Lombardi
The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.
Vince Lombardi
Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy.
Huey P. Long
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
Don Marquis
I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from
doubt.
Charles Horace Mayo
Let us realize that the privilege to work is a gift, that power to work is a blessing,
that love of work is success.
David O. McKay
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, in a letter to Catherine G. Lansing (5 September 1877), published in
The Melville Log : A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (1951) by Jay
Leyda, Vol. 2, p. 765
It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most well-to-
do people that all work is desirable. Most people, well-to-do or not, believe that,
even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless, he is earning his
livelihood by it — he is "employed," as the phrase goes; and most of those who are
well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is
only "industrious" enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays — in
the sacred cause of labour. In short, it has become an article of the creed of
modern morality that all labour is good in itself — a convenient belief to those who
live on the labour of others. But as to those on whom they live, I recommend them
not to take it on trust, but to look into the matter a little deeper.
William Morris, in "Useful Work vs Useless Toil" (1885); later published in Signs of
Change : Seven Lectures, Delivered on Various Occasions (1896)
It is of the nature of man, when he is not diseased, to take pleasure in his work
under certain conditions. And, yet, we must say in the teeth of the hypocritical
praise of all labour, whatsoever it may be, of which I have made mention, that
there is some labour which is so far from being a blessing that it is a curse; that it
would be better for the community and for the worker if the latter were to fold his
hands and refuse to work, and either die or let us pack him off to the workhouse or
prison — which you will.
Here, you see, are two kinds of work — one good, the other bad; one not far
removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a burden to
life.
What is the difference between them, then ? This: one has hope in it, the other has
not. It is manly to do the one kind of work, and manly also to refuse to do the
other.
William Morris, in "Useful Work vs Useless Toil" (1885); later published in Signs of
Change : Seven Lectures, Delivered on Various Occasions (1896)
Vision is where tomorrow begins, for it expresses what you and others who share
the vision will be working hard to create. Since most people don't take the time to
think systematically about the future, those who do, and who base their strategies
and actions on their visions, have inordinate power to shape the future.
Burt Nanus
If you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you
won't have to work.
Ogden Nash
I found it hard working really long hours when I was my own boss. The boss kept
giving me the afternoon off.
John O'Farrell, in The Best a Man Can Get (1999)
Everything in this world depends on work.
Louis Pasteur [citation needed]
We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity.
Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, of Star Trek
You must always work not just within but below your means If you can handle
three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In
that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and
you create a feeling of strength in reserve.
Pablo Picasso
Don't sacrifice your life to work and ideals. The most important things in life are
human relations. I found that out too late.
Katharine Susannah Prichard , as quoted in 100 Great Australians (1983) by Robert
Macklin
The trouble with Opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work.
Herbert Victor Prochnow, in 1001 Ways to Improve your Conversation & Speeches (1952)
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our
tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is
but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet (1934) Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the
prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout
the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern
world has no need of slavery.
Bertrand Russell, in "In Praise of Idleness" (1932)
I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and
never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver
dollar.
I ask you to come through and show me where you're pouring out the blood of your
life.
Carl Sandburg, in "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter" in Chicago Poems (1916), p. 63
The phrase "working mother" is redundant.
Jane Sellman
Sometimes you have to rent a room instead of work.
Master Shake of Aqua Teen Hunger Force
When I was young I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures, so I did
ten times more work.
George Bernard Shaw, as quoted in Appropriate Technology : A Focus for the Nineties
(1991) by Robert William Stevens
Nobody would work for starvation wages if he were not in a situation in which he
preferred such wages to not working at all.
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)
All work done mindfully rounds us out, helps complete us as persons.
Marsha Sinetar
My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes
to us in dreams.

Smoholla, Wanapum religious leader

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

Gloria Steinem, in Moving Beyond Words (1994), Part 5

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Charles J. Sykes, but often misattributed to Bill Gates.

The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some
extent even antibiotic — in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea — known
to medical science is work.

Thomas Szasz
I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is
the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours.
But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time
according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under
compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the
contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.

Nikola Tesla, in "My Inventions" first published in Electrical Experimenter magazine

(1919); republished as My Inventions : The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (1983)
Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and
accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is
mine.

Nikola Tesla, on patent controversies regarding the invention of Radio and other things,
as quoted in "A Visit to Nikola Tesla" by Dragislav L. Petković in Politika (April 1927); as
quoted in Tesla, Master of Lightning (1999) by Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim
Glenn, p. 73 ISBN 0760710058 ; also in Tesla: Man Out of Time (2001) by Margaret
Cheney, p. 230 ISBN 0743215362
The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that
his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter —
for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and
point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.

Nikola Tesla, in "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World" in Modern Mechanics and
Inventions (July 1934)
The biggest mistake we could ever make in our lives is to think we work for
anybody but ourselves.

Brian Tracy
If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.

Mark Twain
Work purifies your heart.

Swami Vivekananda
It's not true that the more sex that you have, the more it interferes with your
work. I find that the more sex you have, the better work you do.

H. G. Wells
I don't believe people die from hard work. They die from stress and worry and fear
— the negative emotions. Those are the killers, not hard work. The fact is, in our
society today, most people don't understand what hard work is all about.

Arthur L. Williams, Jr.

It is amazing what can be accomplished when nobody cares about who gets the
credit.

Robert Yates, as quoted in The Team Selling Solution : Creating and Managing Teams
That Win (2003) by Steve Waterhouse, p. 51
Anonymous Quotations
Sorted alphabetically by first line

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Anonymous proverb, often attributed to Confucius.

Variant: If you love what you do, you'll never have to work a day in your life.

Early to bed,
Early to rise,
Work like hell —
And advertise!

"Old slogan" quoted in The National Provisioner, Vol. 44 (June 1911), p. 35; this has
since become misattributed to many people who might have quoted it.

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with
excellence.

Unknown

First secure an independent income, then practice virtue.

Greek proverb

If a man does only what is required of him, he is a slave. If a man does more than is
required of him, he is a free man.
Chinese proverb

The dumber you are the less they make you do.
Unknown

Work is for people who can't fish.

Unknown