Quotes About Work

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

No job is ever "beneath" you. In whatever you do, do it to the best of your abilities.

Overcome boredom by injecting enthusiasm into your work.

When you say, "I have no time to spend with my family," you are really saying, "Making money in the business is more important than my wife and children.

disobedience, refusal to work, refusal to answer when spoken to, and a determination not to succeed.

There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them.

You did all this chopping and work from sheer goodness, boy?

No, tutti devono imparare, nessuno nasce sapendo già le cose. Walter è intelligentissimo, soltanto rimane indietro perché a volte deve andare nei campi ad aiutare suo padre; ma è in gamba lo stesso. No Jem, io credo che la gente sia di un tipo solo: gente, e basta!

I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing… is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this — the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.

those children to work while Tom's in jail.

Up until now, some of us actually thought that we created and organized the systems in which we work. But should it turn out that natural system…are truly self-organizing, much of that effort was wasted.

I went out the side door, and Sam fell into step behind me as we walked out beyond the mule barn where four mules stood in the lot and on past the cotton house and then down the dim road past a little leaning shack where our tenant farmers lived, a black family in which there was a boy just a year older than I was. His name was Willalee Bookatee. I went on past their house because I knew they would be in the field, too, so there was no use to stop

Hard work applied properly and intelligently, and thinking in an organized manner, must lead to success.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion

It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can't. Anything more than that is luck.

finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning.

Le travail ne représentait qu'ennui pour moi, je détestais aller au bureau. Je me sentais vraiment oppressé. J'avais l'impression que mon moi véritable se rétrécissait de plus en plus, et que j'allais finir par disparaître.

You must not let fatigue set in, she warns. That is what my mother said. Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself. Good advice. To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called 'mind', what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard. The mind is nothing you use, I say. The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.

He wore Armani suits and drove a Jaguar, but finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning. The very fact that he existed in this world would eventually be forgotten. 'Such a shame, he was so young,' people might say. Or they might not.

I have no physical symptoms, but psychologically there's this burden. I've got to get rid of it somehow. Of course, when I first went back to work I was scared the same thing might happen again. It takes positive thinking to overcome fear, otherwise you'll carry around this victim mentality forever.

Too many people work in ways that are not their ways, and that almost guarantees nonperformance.

helping people overcome their limitations to become more successful at work is at the very heart of effective management.

Executives trying to recognize high levels of achievement motivation in their people can look for one last piece of evidence: commitment to the organization. When people love their jobs for the work itself, they often feel committed to the organizations that make that work possible. Committed employees are likely to stay with an organization even when they are pursued by headhunters waving money.