quotations and passages on work

The highest reward for people's
toil is not what they get for it
but what they become by it.

John Ruskin

So much of unhappiness, it seems to me, is due to nerves; and bad nerves are the result of having nothing to do, or doing a thing badly, unsuccessfully or incompetently. Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do. True happiness comes to those who do their work well, followed by a refreshing period of rest. True happiness comes from the right amount of work for the day. Lin Yutang

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. the Buddha

Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere thought, or emotion, or sentiment! As well try to eat beauty! For happiness must be tricked! She loves to see people at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will not be found in palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories and hovering over littered desks: she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child. If you look up suddenly from hard work, you will see her,--but if you look too long she fades sorrowfully away. David Grayson

There is no real wealth but the labor of people. Were the mountains of gold and silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race. Percy Bysshe Shelley

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away
at a rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.
Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not
that blow that did it--but all that had gone before.

Jacob Riis

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Many of us are so busy and work so much that we don't have time to live.
Our work can take up all our life. We may even be addicted to our work,
not because we need the money, but because we don't know how to handle
the suffering and loneliness inside, and so we take refuge in our work. . . . If
we keep working so hard, we will not have enough time to live; we will not
have enough time to touch life's wonders and get
the nourishment and the healing we need.

Thich Nhat Hanh
At Home in the World

Like the star that shines afar,
Without haste and without rest,
Let each one wheel with steady sway
Round the task that rules the day,
And do their best.

Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe

Luck means the hardships and privations which you have not
hesitated to endure; the long nights you have devoted to work.
Luck means the appointments you have never failed to keep;
the trains you have never failed to catch.

Max O'Rell

I studied the lives of great men and women, and I found that the people
who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand,
with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.

Harry S. Truman

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things
are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it;
and they must have a sense of success in it--not a doubtful sense,
such as needs some testimony of other people for its confirmation,
but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been
done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.

John Ruskin

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty
to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.
The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes,
but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Helen Keller

You cannot build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end
each of us must work for his or her own improvement, and at the same time
show a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid
those to whom we think we can be most useful.

Marie Curie

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul is the
work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.

Henry David Thoreau

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any
of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

Thomas A. Edison

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only
with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the
gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if
you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread
that feeds but half people's hunger.

Khalil Gibran

The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it, whether we
arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be
vanquished before night comes--or whether we open our eyes with
the sunrise to welcome it as an approaching friend who will keep
us delightful company and who will make us feel at evening
that the day was well worth its fatigue.

Lucy Larcom

work 2 - work 3

Starting out to make money is the greatest mistake in life.
Do what you feel you have a flair for doing, and if you are
good enough at it, the money will come.

Greer Garson

Labor disgraces no person; unfortunately,
you occasionally find people who disgrace labor.

Ulysses S. Grant

Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Half effort does not produce
half results, it produces no results. Work, continuous work and
hard work, is the only way to accomplish results that last.

Hamilton Holt

Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest
where you haven't planted.

David Bly

Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential
ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for
most people this comes chiefly through their work.

Bertrand Russell

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference
between taking one's work seriously, and taking one's self seriously.
The first is imperative, and the second is disastrous.

Margot Fonteyn

I don't like work, but I like what is in work--the chance
to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself,
not for others--what no other person can ever know.

Joseph Conrad

The return from your work must be the satisfaction that work brings you
and the world's need of that work. With this, life is heaven,
or as near heaven as you can get. Without this--with work
which you despise, which bores you, and which the world
does not need--this life is hell.

W.E.B. du Bois

What a person accomplishes in a day depends upon the way in which he or she
approaches their tasks. When we accept tough jobs as a challenge to our ability
and wade into them with joy and enthusiasm, miracles can happen. When we do
our work with a dynamic, conquering spirit, we get things done.

Arland Gilbert

Work and play can be the same. When you are following your
energy and doing what you want to do all the time, the distinction
between work and play dissolves. Work is no longer what you
have to do, and play what you want to do. When you are doing
what you love, you may work harder and produce more
than ever before, because you are having fun.

Shakti Gawain

If you could once make up your mind never to undertake more work
than you can carry on calmly, quietly, without hurry or flurry. . . .
and if the instant you feel yourself growing nervous and out of breath,
you would stop and take breath, you would find this simple common-sense
rule doing for you what no prayers or tears could ever accomplish.

Elizabeth Prentiss

If you wish to work properly, you should never lose sight of two
great principles: first, a profound respect for the work undertaken,
and second, a complete indifference to its fruits. Thus only
can you work with the proper attitude.

Brahmananda

A vision without work is but a dream; a work without a vision is
drudgery, alas; a vision and a work is the hope of the world.

unattributed

The nature of most work--repetitive and unsatisfying--guarantees that
we think of our jobs as little more than a means to support ourselves
and to enable us to pursue leisure activities that commonly add little to
our sense of personal significance. We are, in short, starved for meaning.

Gordon Livingston
Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart

Articles and book excerpts on work:

Doing Dishes      tom walsh
My Favorite Four-Letter Words      Norman Vincent Peale
Sabotaged Efforts      Ray Whiting
Shoveling Snow      tom walsh
Still Don't Know What You Want to Be?      Valerie Young

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The great composer does not set to work because he or she is inspired,
but becomes inspired because he or she is working. Beethoven, Wagner,
Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as
much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his
or her figures. They didn't waste time waiting for an inspiration.

Ernest Newman

Work, especially good work, becomes easy only
when desire has learned to discipline itself.

Rabindranath Tagore

There is a condition or circumstance that has a greater bearing
upon the happiness of life than any other. What is it? Something
to do; some congenial work. Take away the occupation of all
people and what a wretched world it would be.

John Burroughs

work 2 - work 3

The difference between work and play is only a matter
of attitude. Work, fully done, is play.

Gerald G. May

All work is empty save when there is love. And when you work with
love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.

Khalil Gibran

When our inner self connects to our work and our work to our inner self,
the work knows no limit, for the inner self knows no limit.

Matthew Fox

The great majority of people do their work mechanically, and regard
it as unavoidable drudgery, whereas all work should be a delight, as
it would be if all workers were in the right place and worked only when
they were fresh and vigorous. Then the exercise of brain and muscle
would give a sense of wellbeing, and work would be a tonic, not a grind;
life a delight, not a struggle. Work, like religion, "never was designed to
make our pleasures less." Work is essential to health, every faculty,
contributes to one's efficiency, gives a keener edge to all of one's
sensibilities, and health is the foundation of happiness.

Orison Swett Marden
The Joys of Living (1913)

In the Bhagavad Gita, it’s said that one of the great lessons is in how much
better it is to do your own work, even if you have to do it imperfectly, than
it is to do somebody else’s work perfectly. A lot of people don’t get that,
especially in Western culture. What it comes down to is understanding that
if you are following your bliss or pursuing what you know you’re about,
then the real motivation is in just advancing confidently in the direction of
your dreams. Even if you’re not doing it as well as other people are doing
it, or not doing it the way other people think you should be doing it, it’s far
more enlightening and much better for you as a person. Ultimately, it would
serve many others in much greater ways for you to do your own thing
blissfully than for you to do somebody else’s work perfectly.

Wayne Dyer
Happiness Is the Way