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Work Quotes

Quotes on the meaning of work.

Several quotes here describe work as a solitary process, one that takes real effort to protect from distraction, while others connect a person's politics directly to the character of their work. Related reading includes Growth Quotes.

Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform.

Quotes by Edward Young

Sometimes when an actor and director work together for the first time, it's not as if there's a suspicion, but there is tentativeness, a certain amount of a right of passage you have to go through in order to get...

Quotes by Edward Zwick

Many a fine SF story uses science or technology merely as backdrop. Many a fine SF story presumes a technological breakthrough and explores its implications without attempting to predict how the thing might actual work.

Quotes by Edward M. Lerner

The Nobel Prize, so long regarded in our science as the highest reward a man's work can earn, must bring to its recipient a most solemn sense of his debt to his fellow scientists and those of the past.

Quotes by Edward M. Purcell

The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself.

Quotes by Edward McKendree Bounds

Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in this world.

Quotes by Edward McKendree Bounds

When you're working on a creative thing, everyone has an idea, and they're pushing it. The first time you work with anybody, you have to get comfortable with the way another person pushes hard for what they want.

Quotes by Edward Norton

The people who work in the scientific field, they need help to convey what it's about.

Quotes by Edward Norton

Work takes different forms. I can spend two or three days without completing anything, and it's choppy: it's filled with all kinds of irrationalities and stupid actions. I have some notion, and then I drop it because something else comes...

Quotes by Edward Ruscha

The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare...

Quotes by Edward Ruscha

Basically everything I've done in art, I was in possession of when I was 20 years old. I use a waste retrieval method of working. I'll go back and use something that disgusted me 15 years ago but that I...

Quotes by Edward Ruscha

As an artist, I gotta stand up to my own work.

Quotes by Edward Ruscha

My friends and neighbors were always fixing their cars. Soldiers who felt restless wanted to work on something, and they understood cars. Me, I like to look at cars but I was never really a mechanic.

Quotes by Edward Ruscha

I have no social agenda with my work. I'm deadpan about it.

Quotes by Edward Ruscha

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

Quotes by Edward Hirsch

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

Quotes by Edward Hirsch

A writer's work is to witness things.

Quotes by Edward Hoagland

I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.

Quotes by Edward Hopper

I'm always pleased when people respond to the work.

Quotes by Edward James Olmos

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die.

Quotes by Edward Kennedy

Frequently Asked Questions

What kind of quotes are on the "Work" page?
These lean toward the thoughtful side of work — the idea that "intellectual work is essentially a lonely process," the belief that one's politics and "the character of his particular work are inseparable," and an image of people unwinding after work all over the world talking about life's bigger questions.
Is there a spiritual angle to any of these?
While these particular quotes are secular, if you're looking for a spiritual perspective on work, see Prayers for that theme.
Do these quotes connect work to personal identity?
Yes, one of the strongest lines here argues that your politics and "the character of his particular work are inseparable" — the idea that what you do reflects who you are. If that resonates, Growth quotes explore a similar idea of work shaping the person.
Is there anything here about effort or persistence?
These specific quotes focus more on the nature and meaning of work than on effort itself, but Effort quotes cover that ground directly.
What about setting goals through work?
For that angle, Goal quotes is the better fit — the "Work" page here is more about the character and process of working itself.

There's also a lighter side - people unwinding after work to talk through life's bigger questions over drinks. See Effort Quotes and Goal Quotes for more on getting things done.