Meaningful Work Quotes

The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. ~ Christopher Lasch

It is a great victory if you learn how to survive in today's hard times; it's an even greater victory if you
help someone else survive and find meaningful work. ~ Richard N. Bolles

Not knowing how near the truth is, we seek it far away. ~ Hakuin Ekaku

When you don't have much money, cooking can be incredibly reassuring. You feel like you're doing meaningful work. ~ Alice Waters

For most people, life would be boring without meaningful work. ~ Timothy Ferriss

Is it enough for people to simply enjoy their work without finding it meaningful or being passionate about it? I think it is. In fact, I would prefer to completely rid the concept of meaningful work as the gold standard, and replace it with a new one: doing satisfying work that meet one's needs. ~ Barbara Moses

But the more we learn about happiness and fulfillment, the more apparent it becomes that family, community, meaningful work and networks of trustworthy collaborators and friends are the sources of happiness and fulfillment, not the accumulation of institutional promises and more stuff, which turns out to have little impact on happiness or fulfillment. ~ Anonymous

To increase student engagement and ownership of learning, we should give students opportunities to do meaningful work - work that makes a difference locally, nationally, and globally. ~ Eric Williams

We have the capacity to create a remarkably different economy: one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security. ~ Paul Hawken

The more we talk about the epidemic as an individual disease phenomenon or a moral failing, the easier it is to obfuscate and ignore the social and economic conditions that predispose certain individuals to addiction. The fix isn't more Suboxone or lectures on morality but rather a reinvigorated democracy that provides a pathway for meaningful work, with a living wage, for everybody. ~ Beth Macy

If you want a meaningful life for yourself don't ask "What can the world offer to me?" but "What can I offer to the world? ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

For me, the best things in life - meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex, and other basic needs and pleasures - are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money. ~ Ray Dalio

Focusing on one thing without interruption is how you get meaningful work done. ~ Nate Green

There may be no single thing more important in our efforts to achieve meaningful work and fulfilling relationships than to learn to practice the art of communication. ~ Max De Pree

The aspirations of most people
security, pleasure, leisure, meaningful work, creative and intellectual pursuits
are to be supported. These desires and dreams are not shameful. In supporting them, we are showing solidarity with working people, for whom these are luxuries and not givens. ~ Irena Klepfisz

I think it's fun to have work that you can relate to, that you can feel like is meaningful. ~ Joan Cusack

When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you've had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered. ~ James C. Collins

I used to think of work as a bad word. Back in the corporate world, work was something that prevented me from living, something that kept me from feeling satisfied or fulfilled or passionate. Even the word itself carried with it a negative connotation. Work - bluck! When I left the corporate world, I swore off the word altogether. Noun, verb, adjective - I avoided all of work's iterations. I no longer 'went to work,' so that was easy to remove from my vocabulary. In fact, I no longer 'worked' at all; instead I replaced the word with a more specific verb: I would 'write' or 'teach' or 'speak' or 'volunteer,' but I refused to 'work.' I no longer went to the gym to 'workout'; instead I 'exercised.' And I stopped wearing 'work clothes'; I chose instead to wear 'dress clothes.' And I avoided getting 'worked up,' preferring to call it 'stress' or 'anxiety.' And I didn't bring my car to the shop to get 'worked on,' deciding instead to have my vehicle 'repaired.' Hell, I even avoided 'handiwork' 92 and 'housework,' selecting their more banal alternatives. Suffice it to say, I wanted nothing to do with the word. I wanted it not only stricken from my lexicon, but from my memory, erasing every shred of the thing that kept me from pursuing my dream for over a decade. But after a year of that nonsense, I realized something: it wasn't the word that was bad; it was the meaning I gave to the word. It took removing the word from my everyday speech for a year to discover that it wasn't a bad w ~ Joshua Fields Millburn

I highly recommend Marci Alboher's One Person/ Multiple Careers. It includes lots of practical strategies for living the slash. Malcom Gladwell is also a constant source of inspiration for me. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposes that there are three criteria for meaningful work - complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward - and that these can often be found in creative work.2 These criteria absolutely fit with what cultivating meaningful work means in the context of the Wholehearted journey. Last, I think everyone should read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist3 - I try to read it at least once a year. It's a powerful way of seeing the connections between our gifts, our spirituality, and our work (slashed or not) and how they come together to create meaning in our lives. ~ Brene Brown

the miracle of meaningful work. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Meaningful work is within your grasp. ~ Dan Miller

Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They're individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things.
It's up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work. ~ Lori McWilliam Pickert

These include the need to express one's gifts and do meaningful work, the need to love and be loved, the need to be truly seen and heard, and to see and hear other people, the need for connection to nature, the need to play, explore, and have adventures, the need for emotional intimacy, the need to serve something larger than oneself, and the need sometimes to do absolutely nothing and just be. ~ Charles Eisenstein

I looked at this first sheet, words scribbled confidently on a lined pad. My attempt at making contact the spirit of Llandor. Disaster. I couldn't do the language or locate the period. The pad of paper, with its grey-mauve rules, was all wrong. It was intended for meaningful work, figures, calculations, notes. ~ Iain Sinclair

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.

But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good....

....An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others. ~ Alain De Botton

We didn't want to be presidents, or astronouts, or Bill Gates. We had pathetically simple dreams: to do meaningful work that we could be proud of, to be together, and to be happy. That certainly wasn't too much to ask. Or was it? ~ Tiffanie DeBartolo

A poor leader will tell you how many people work for them. A great leader will tell you how many people they work for. ~ Simon Sinek

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and the author of Man's Search for Meaning, wrote that human beings create meaning in three ways: thought their work, though their relationships, and by how they choose to meet unavoidable suffering. Every life brings hardship and trial, and every life also offers deep possibilities for meaningful work and love ... I've learned that courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin. ~ Eric Greitens

But there is a second answer to the question of why greatness, one that is at the very heart of what motivated us to undertake this huge project in the first place: the search for meaning, or more precisely, the search for meaningful work. I ~ James C. Collins

To have meaningful work is a tremendous happiness. ~ Rita Mae Brown

We are the only species on this planet without full employment. ~ Paul Hawken

I'm not saying that I was starting actively to think about it. I'm just saying that I could see why people did. See that they liked the combination of long dull uneventful days with a strong sense of purpose looming overall; the mix of aimless time, structured days and meaningful work. A bit like human life in general, you could say, the terrible regularity with which nothing happens, the genuine terror when something does. Hurry up and wait. That's the motto which governs most lives. It's the motto which governs the Wall, for sure. The only thing worse than when nothing happens is when something does.
Pg 120 ~ John Lanchester

Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by an large, excluded from meaningful play. ~ David Riesman

It was more that he did better being busy, keeping to a routine. It helped hold the black dogs of thought at bay. Also he had learned that a person could be happy with having done the best they could under the circumstances. It didn't always have to be bright and shiny and impressive to the outside observer. ~ Ellen Airgood

What makes work fun is doing meaningful work. ~ Darren Hardy

To do meaningful work is to contribute - to create value in society. ~ Charles Koch

Human nature has been sold short ... [humans have] a higher nature which ... includes the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile and for preferring to do it well. ~ Abraham Maslow

When I see brokenness, poverty and crime in inner cities, I also see the enormous potential and readiness for transformation and rebirth. We are creating an art form that comes from the heart and reflects the pain and sorrow of people's lives. It also expresses joy, beauty, and love. This process lays the foundation of building a genuine community in which people are reconnected with their families, sustained by meaningful work, nurtured by the care of each other and will together raise and educate their children. Then we witness social change in action. ~ Lily Yeh

Any meaningful work for peace must follow the principle of nonduality, the principle of penetration. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. ~ Yvon Chouinard

Our communities basically want the same things - safe, clean environments; affordable, adequate housing and transportation; educational opportunities; accessible, quality health care; meaningful work at a fair wage; and equitable services for everyone. So, in the spirit of warmth and energy that our campfire metaphor brings, I invite each of you to be the spark that ignites your community to be safer, healthier, and fairer - and fired up for change. ~ Frances Dunn Butterfoss

We were created for meaningful work, and one of life's greatest pleasures is the satisfaction of a job well done. ~ John C. Maxwell

The positive emotions that arise in ... unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Don't freak yourself out by what other people have. They don't have what you've got. ~ Simon Sinek

Many South Africans qualify for working visas in the UK and are keen to experience working and living overseas. However, more and more young people are rebelling against the materialistic 'me' generation and are keen to find meaningful work during their stay. ~ Susan Harris

There is no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work in the right way. ~ Winslow Homer

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies. ~ Albert Camus

The love within us is meant to extend outward. The closer we grow to our inner light, we feel a natural urge to share it. We all long for meaningful work, some creative endeavor that will be our ministry, by which the energies within us might flow out to help heal the world. ~ Marianne Williamson

TEN GUIDEPOSTS FOR WHOLEHEARTED LIVING 1. Cultivating authenticity: letting go of what people think 2. Cultivating self-compassion: letting go of perfectionism 3. Cultivating a resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness 4. Cultivating gratitude and joy: letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark 5. Cultivating intuition and trusting faith: letting go of the need for certainty 6. Cultivating creativity: letting go of comparison 7. Cultivating play and rest: letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth 8. Cultivating calm and stillness: letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle 9. Cultivating meaningful work: letting go of self-doubt and "supposed to" 10. Cultivating laughter, song, and dance: letting go of being cool and "always in control ~ Brene Brown

I remember an insight that taught me much about life. One day I felt that I had everything that I really wanted in life. I had a creative and meaningful work as a therapist and course leader, I had a relationship with a beautiful woman, who I loved and who loved me, I had friend that I trusted and I had money to do what I wanted.
But in spite of all this, I still had a feeling that there was something missing in my life. I was not satisfied. The thirst and longing in my heart was still searching for something more. It made me realize that the deepest pain in my heart was that I was still separated from the Whole and that no outer things or relationships could ease this pain. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

In addition to the gremlins, another thing that gets in the way of meaningful work is the struggle to define who we are and what we do in an honest way. In a world that values the primacy of work, the most common question that we ask and get asked is, "What do you do?" I used to wince every time someone asked me this question. I felt like my choices were to reduce myself to an easily digestible sound bite or to confuse the hell out of people. Now my answer to "What do you do?" is, "How much time do you have?" Most of us have complicated answers to this question. For example, I'm a mom, partner, researcher, writer, storyteller, sister, friend, daughter, and teacher. All of these things make up who I am, so I never know how to answer that question. ~ Brene Brown

It is paradoxical but nonetheless true that the nearer man comes to his goal to make his life easy and abundant, the more he undermines the foundations of a meaningful existence. ~ Franz Alexander

What did you do as a child that made that hours pass like minutes? [Herein lies the key to your earthy pursuits.] ~ Carl Jung

Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes. ~ Hannah Arendt

I wonder a lot about making things meaningful. You want to do meaningful work and make art, but you're making records, which is good, but you don't want to weight them - it's a very curious thing. ~ Doseone

There are lots of jobs in search of talent. And there's lots of talent in search of meaningful work. ~ Maynard Webb

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. ~ Charles Bukowski

The world is exactly the same as it was before, except that Americans now realize that they are a part of it. People get blown up every day, but not until Americans started getting blown up within our own borders by people who aren't Americans did it become real to us.
The world has not changed, but our attention has been called to it. We are looking directly at the sun now, and it is blinding us. We need the same books we always have; we need our friends and hobbies and meaningful work; and we need them quick, to provide the dark glasses that will let us watch the eclipse, and respond to it usefully, and not go mad. ~ Peni Griffin

You just have to forget whatever you were taught about "meaningful work" and start noticing whatever has meaning to you. ~ Barbara Sher

The years after 50 can be a time of great productivity, meaningful work, pleasure, creativity, and innovation. It's a huge opportunity. ~ Jane Pauley

Happiness isn't found in some finite checklist of goals that we can diligently complete and then coast. It's how we live our lives in the process. That's why the four pillars of happiness are faith, family, community and meaningful work. Those are priorities we have to keep investing in. ~ Arthur C. Brooks

Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it's not merely benign or 'too bad' if we don't use the gifts that we've been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don't use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighted down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief. ~ Brene Brown

Our goal is for our kids to be intentional about everything they do --- to reject passivity and mindless consumption and to embrace an ethos of action, of productivity, of meaningful work, of genuinely lifelong learning. ~ Ben Sasse

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work - this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can't be found. Instead, it's just one interruption after another. ~ Jason Fried

Critics should find meaningful work. ~ John Grisham

For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. ~ James C. Collins

The ability to overcome failure
to live through it and move on
is crucial. If we are not willing to face failure
if we don't have the skills to survive it
we have precluded any real creativity or risk. Failure may never become our friend, but if we are to do meaningful work, perhaps failure needs to be our companion. ~ John Hunter

Perfect! You guys are the same age. I bet you have a lot in common."
Classic adult logic. Reid and I are vaguely the same age, so of course we're basically soul mates. It's like horoscopes. Somehow I'm supposed to believe that I'm similar in some meaningful way to every single person born on my birthday. Or every single Sagittarius. I mean, I barely have anything in common with Cassie, and we were born six minutes apart. ~ Becky Albertalli

She had developed a number of habits in her younger years, none of which carried with them a bright future, and the things she would offer to do for a couple of dollars would make the Devil blush. ~ Rachel Autumn Deering

There was a Gallup poll that said something like 70 percent of people in the United States do not enjoy their job - they work to put food on the table and get insurance to survive. So, what happens when technology can do all that work for us and allow us to actually do what we enjoy with our time? ~ Peter Diamandis

Salsa is a way of life. Tener salsa en la vida is to fully enjoy life, by treasuring family, relationships, work, and community. ~ Juana Bordas

A year seems very long to wait before I see them, but remind them that while we wait we may all work, so these hard days need not be wasted. I know they will remember all I said to them, that they will be loving children to you, will do their duty faithfully, fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women. ~ Louisa May Alcott

I urge you with all sincerity to get to work, write a book, write two - three - four books, just as a matter of course. Don't worry about 'wasting' an idea or 'spoiling' a plot by going too fast. If you are capable of turning out a masterpiece, you'll get other and even better ideas in the future. Right now your job is to write, and to write books so that by so doing you'll gain the experience to write still better books later on. ~ Robert Bloch

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home. ~ David Foster Wallace

I never enjoyed my work more than when I worked with William Powell. He was a brilliant actor, a delightful companion, a great friend and above all, a true gentleman. ~ Myrna Loy

Culturally one of the most difficult things that happens is to get creative people to understand [that] the world is no longer just defined by television. The thing that happened, and has been happening for some time here, is that our work was much more diverse than even we knew it was. And I think as we began to change, the way we tackled problems and the way that we looked at problems was completely and utterly holistic in a way that I'd probably not ever really experienced before. ~ Rick Mathieson

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use. ~ Arthur Miller

The tutor gave us our work, and if we had trouble, she'd help us on it, but we were really only working on the stuff that our school gave us - well, I was, because I go to a public school. ~ Quinn Shephard

Man is not only part of a field, but a part and member of his group. When people are together, as when they are at work, then the most unnatural behavior, which only appears in late stages or abnormal cases, would be to behave as separate Egos. Under normal circumstances they work in common, each a meaningfully functioning part of the whole. ~ Max Wertheimer

Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film. ~ Mark Haddon

My father worked real hard. I admired him. My father taught me you needed to work with your brain and not your back. I've made that a passion. ~ Don Cornelius

Work isn't supposed to be easy, it's supposed to be gratifying. ~ Ken Segall

I am definitely going to take a course on time management ... just as soon as I can work it into my schedule. ~ Louis E. Boone

But are the twin souls destined to be together? Synchronicity is at work here to bring the two back together again. How entrancing to find the same magical alchemy still at work, just as it was at the first meeting – a recognition of a deep rooted love so entrenched and so accepted, it could only have been forged in other lifetimes together. And probably that is what love at first sight is, recognition of an ancient love. ~ Chimnese Davids

A leader with integrity has one self, at home and at work, with family and with colleagues. He or she has a unifying set of values that guide choices of action regardless of the situation. ~ James M. Kouzes

I spent years tryin' to shield her from her choices, didn't work. I'm not gonna let you do it and I'm not gonna teach you that someone's gonna shield you from shit. You gotta learn too. You make choices, they're yours and you gotta take responsibility for them. ~ Kristen Ashley

Tiger, come on now, you've still got work to do. This round and golf tournament are not over. Hang in there and finish the race. ~ Tiger Woods

My work in government has flowed from the fundamental idea of personal empowerment. It's about giving people the tools they need to pave their own way. ~ James Langevin

Hide me from day's garish eye, While the bee with honied thigh, That at her flowery work doth sing, And the waters murmuring With such consort as they keep, Entice the dewy-feathered sleep. ~ John Milton

The U.S. and Iraq will work together next year to shift Iraqi resources from unproductive subsidies to productive uses that enable Iraqis to earn livelihoods. ~ Zalmay Khalilzad

My daughter and I are so close. I can describe anything she's doing, the least little thing, and I get all excited about it. It's like medicine. When I come home from work and the first thing I see is her and she runs and jumps in my arms - everything that went bad in the day goes completely out the window. It's like taking a dose of medicine. It makes everything better. ~ Nancy O'Dell

There is nothing wrong with your marriage if you're dealing with bills and kids and the broken garbage disposal and in-laws and work demands. That's a normal marriage. ~ Phil McGraw

I was educated to think maybe Brazil works, maybe it doesn't. But I decided I am going to make this country work for my children. I am investing all my effort now in making Brazil a great country. ~ Eike Batista

If you are given a lot of money without having to work for it, you won't appreciate it as much as if you made it yourself. ~ Goran Ivanisevic

Starbucks has a role and a meaningful relationship with people that is not only about the coffee. ~ Howard Schultz

A young house painter who fails miserably in his choice of profession is capable, also for a period of twenty years, of having himself talked about the world over, without having accomplished a single, useful, objective, practical piece of work. In this case, also, it is a tremendous noise that one day quietly fades away into an "all to no avail." The world of work continues on its calm, quiet, vitally necessary course. Of the great tumult, nothing remains but a chapter in falsely oriented history books, which are only a burden to our children. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Music is for people. The word 'pop' is simply short for popular. It means that people like it. I'm just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as my brain and fingers work, I'm cool. ~ Eddie Van Halen

Well, it's more of a sane life to be part of an ensemble! I find that the work can be more specific too and I have to really make sure I know where I am in the story because I'm not in every scene. ~ Lauren Graham