Quotes About Work

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. If a man values productive work, his happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his life.

I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart

I would have to think on a nice clean job. I don't want to think. Not their way. It will have to be their way, no matter where I go. I want a job where I won't have to think.

I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.

The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life.

Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do what the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you.

As far as work goes, maybe instead of changing jobs, I should be changing the way I am doing my job. I'd probably have a better position by now if I did.

Haw was beginning to realize the difference between activity and productivity.

They liked working in a company that valued action and results.

We head out into space, ready for anything, which is to say, for solitude, arduous work, self-sacrifice, and death. Out of modesty we don't say it aloud, but from time to time we think about how magnificent we are. In the meantime—in the meantime, we're not trying to conquer the universe; all we want is to expand Earth to its limits.

The executives that ran Lehman Bros. into the ground several years ago had a macho culture that abhorred personal time. One executive was pressured to go to the office while his wife was actually delivering a baby.[18] Whether such assiduity resulted in a better work product has now been pretty definitively ascertained.

When young people ask me for advice today, I generally say, "Decide what is sacred to you, and put your best life energies at its service. Make that the focus of your studies, your work, the test for your pleasures and your relationships. Don't ever let fear or craving for security turn you aside.

Moving lockstep through a series of predictable transitions is no longer a route to personal security. Each man and woman must put together a highly individualized sequence of transitions in and out of school, work, and marriage in order to take advantage of shifting opportunities and respond to unexpected setbacks--a do-it-yourself biolography.

Until fifty years ago, men typically under-reported how much household work or child care they did because they did not want to admit to doing "women's work." It is a huge step forward that men think they should say they do more than they actually do.

But working women with retired husbands tend to be more dissatisfied with their marriages than any other type of wife.39

Even today, Young says, marriage is "the cornerstone of patriarchal power." Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard argue that marriage is one of the primary ways that "men benefit from, and exploit, the work of women."23

Twenty-six American states passed laws explicitly prohibiting or limiting the employment of married women in various fields. By 1940 more than three-quarters of the school systems in the United States refused to hire married women as teachers.9

Several studies show that it is a woman's degree of satisfaction with either the housewife role or paid work, and the continuity of her work experience when she does work, that best correlates with positive outcomes in her children.

Then I spent the next four years translating it into English. That was a very valuable experience. It enabled me to internalize somebody else's refined understanding of the dharma and to work very closely with

Except that my father got a raise, and my mother didn't because she doesn't get paid for housework, and my sister stopped reading those self-esteem books because she met a new boy

Sorry, but retirement offends me. You don't just stop fighting in the middle of a war because your legs hurt. So why do you get to stop working in the middle of your life just because your prostate hurts? That's desertion.

Susan never denied the existence of God. But her beliefs were secularized and lodged in the world around her. When she was once asked, "Do you pray?" she responded, "I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.

We derive the greatest pleasure and fulfillment when all our faculties are drawn together into our life's work. In this state of absorption, we experience extraordinary satisfaction. We human beings are attracted to the experience of intense involvement. The outcome of this involvement, says Hokusai, is sublime. "By ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature." Hokusai's lesson, finally, is that a life of passion for dharma is a fulfilled

When you engage in a work that taps your talent and fuels your passion -- that rises out of a great need in the world that you feel drawn by conscience to meet -- therein lies your voice, your calling, your soul's code.