Quotes About Work

Your working style is describe your self..

To make a long story short . . . there's nothing like having the boss walk in.

The motto in the workaholic Silicon Valley is "Stop for lunch and you are lunch."

I don't write with any audience in mind. I just write. I take a chance on the audience. That's what I did originally, and I think it's worked--in the sense that I find there is an audience.

Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention.

If you work hard, you have a better chance of producing something that you're proud of. If you don't, you won't. It's really simple.

Hannah wanted to put the next day's work on the blackboard. This would mean that she needn't turn her back on the class first thing, which is as unwise in junior teaching as in lion-taming.

Any book represents effort, struggle, work--I know, I write them myself--every book deserves attention, even if that ends with dismissal.

When one demands equal rights for women, one needs to assess in which areas women can work better than men, in which they can work like men, and in which they need protection and affirmative action for when they cannot work like men.

They say tedium is a sickness that afflicts the inert, or only attacks those who have nothing to do. However, this affliction of the soul is subtles than that: it attacks those with a predisposition towards it and is less lenient on those who work or pretend to work (which comes to the same thing anyway) than on the truely inert.

There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.

You ask about the effects of my work on others. If I may wax ironical, that is a masculine questions. Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand - in the same sense that I have understood - that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.

We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.

Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.

control has to be by feedback from the work done. The work itself has to provide the information. If it has to be checked all the time, there is no control

It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence

A person's way of performing can be slightly modified, but it is unlikely to be completely changed—and certainly not easily. Just as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways that they best perform. A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs.