Working Life Quotes

I like normal life, but I will go crazy if I'm not working. ~ Joey King

At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.
Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife's bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.
'It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me...And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die! ~ Leo Tolstoy

Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time
making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts. ~ Herbert Hoover

I was looking for the meaning of life when I was in college. And my deal with my dad was as long as I was taking a full course load, then he would pay. And the times that I wasn't taking a full course load, then I was off the dole and I was working. ~ John Mackey

I'm still spending my working life trying to mine people's souls and now they're complimenting me in reviews on the amount of time I spend in the gym. On the definition of my triceps. ~ Jason Isaacs

Teaching was my transition from student life to working life. In those days, our system of education was a little different. The number of students in each class was huge. I think in political science general, which I taught, it was around 100. ~ Pranab Mukherjee

A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different. ~ Stephen Fry

As is the case for many people with multiple sclerosis, the effects of weakened limbs, spasticity and fatigue had cut my working life in half. Yet not a single GP, neurologist or nurse, and none of the MS websites, had mentioned the use of neuroenhancers for the treatment of neurological fatigue. ~ M. J. Hyland

One of the first lessons I learned in working life was that you don't need to like every one of your colleagues, and they don't need to like you either. You just have to respect them, and getting their respect in return. ~ Marcella Purnama

If you believe the world will be a better place because you have both the desire and the means to take charge, that's the time for you to jump in. It doesn't matter if you rise up to take the lead only once or twice in your entire working life or if you do it daily. There are so many moments when you can make a difference--by enriching an outcome, saving a great idea, defending the beleaguered or downtrodden, and not least, expressing your own gifts and wisdom. ~ Charlotte Beers

Fiona had never learned her mother's language and she had never shown much respect for the stories that it preserved-the stories that Grant had taught and written about, and still did write about, in his working life. She referred to their heroes as "old Njal" or "old Snorri." But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris's trip, and Auden's. She didn't really plan to travel there. She said the weather was too dreadful. Also-she said-there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for-but never did get to see. ~ Alice Munro

Every year of my working life, I have been fortunate enough to earn more money than I have spent. ~ Giles Andreae

In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (Hermite, 1822-1901) could say without exaggeration, 'Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.' Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, 'By studying the masters, not the pupils. ~ Eric Temple Bell

I read like a crazy person, I play the piano, and I'm a photographer. I always say my photography keeps me sane. I spend a lot of time in the darkroom. It's a very solitary, quiet life when I'm not working. ~ Alaina Huffman

I certainly don't feel any more super than any of the other people I knew in my working life ... Quite the reverse. In fact, guilt is my middle name, and I think anybody who does do that thing with work and children and everything knows exactly what I'm talking about. ~ Jennifer Rowe

Obviously I've spent most of my working life with men and they have this way of operating which seems a bit alien to me. ~ Janet Street-Porter

If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals ... We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities. ~ Erich Fromm

As long as we go on loving and working life is worth while. ~ Ruth Draper

I want to feel like I'm making a difference in this world. And I want some time for living rather than just working. Life is for living, isn't it? It can't be all just for working ~ Zack Love

I believe - I know (there are not many things I should care to dogmatize about, on the subject of writing) that writers need solitude, and seek alienation of a kind every day of their working lives. (And remember, they are not even aware when and when not they are working.) ... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. ~ Nadine Gordimer

As I'll explain, mission is one of these desirable traits, and like any such desirable trait, it too requires that you first build career capital - a mission launched without this expertise is likely doomed to sputter and die. But capital alone is not enough to make a mission a reality. Plenty of people are good at what they do but haven't reoriented their career in a compelling direction. Accordingly, I will go on to explore a pair of advanced tactics that also play an important role in making the leap from a good idea for a mission to actually making that mission a reality. In the chapters ahead, you'll learn the value of systematically experimenting with different proto-missions to seek out a direction worth pursuing. You'll also learn the necessity of deploying a marketing mindset in the search for your focus. In other words, missions are a powerful trait to introduce into your working life, but they're also fickle, requiring careful coaxing to make them a reality. This ~ Cal Newport

What's really important in life? Sitting on a beach? Looking at television eight hours a day? I think we have to appreciate that we're alive for only a limited period of time, and we'll spend most of our lives working. ~ Victor Kiam

The reason why we are all different is to allow us to; to keep learning about each other so we can keep working with each other and live with one another. ~ Dee Dee Artner

My working life has always been wrapped up in doing my job to the best of my abilities and doing the best for my family. It is not a contest between the two. ~ Johann Lamont

I have had demanding jobs since I was 18 years old. I have had two sick days in all my working life. ~ Mariella Frostrup

Let every man feel that he is the architect and builder of his own life, and that he proposes to make a success of it by working. ~ Heber J. Grant

In the mid-1990s, when I stopped having to run from the shows to the film developing lab and first saw digital images, I blessed technology and was convinced that my working life was changing for the better. ~ Suzy Menkes

When my daughter Zulekha was born, I was at the pinnacle of my working life as a model, and I pulled myself in two trying to cope with being both a mother and a career girl. ~ Iman

Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it's a flat experience for the reader. ~ Karen Traviss

The things that make a great job great...are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect to get a good job. ~ Cal Newport

Then the bull shook himself, turned his head and looked at us. There was an awed whisper from one of the young men: "By gaw, it's working!" I enjoyed myself after that. I can't think of anything in my working life that has given me more pleasure than standing in that pen directing the life-saving jet and watching the bull savouring it. ~ James Herriot

If you can shape your business life or your working life, you can just look at it as another extension - you just fulfill all your values as a human being in the work place. If you are an activist, you bring the activism of your life into your business, or if you love creative art, you can bring that in. ~ Anita Roddick

In my mind, the CalMac ferry is linked with the joy of arrival, the sadness of departure, the loss of loved ones brought home by ferry to rest in island soil. It is friendships made and a working life begun. ~ Johann Lamont

Uncle Acton spent the whole of his working life in India, for the simple reason that he gave up work very young. ~ Rosemary Sutcliff

You've had a long working life
As everyone knows
You can now do nothing at all
And then have a doze
Enjoy Your Retirement ~ John Walter Bratton

The Kaizen Philosophy assumes that our way of life - be it our working life, our social life, or our home life - deserves to be constantly improved. ~ Masaaki Imai

For me the major turning point in my working life was when I figured out that the work I produced when I felt inspired wasn't any different from the work I produced when I felt uninspired
at least a few months later. I think that "inspiration" has to do with your own confidence in your ideas, your blood sugar, the external pressures in your life, and a million other factors only tangentially related to the actual quality of the work. If creative work makes you sane and happy (and if it supports you financially), it's terrible to harness it to something you can't control, like "inspiration"
it sucks to only be happy when something you can't control occurs. ~ Cory Doctorow

If confirmed, [Judge of the Supreme Court] will write the words that will either broaden or narrow our rights for the rest of your working life. You will be interpreting the Constitution in which we as a people place our faith and on which our freedoms as a nation rest. And on a daily basis, the words of your opinions will affect countless individuals as they seek protection behind the courthouse doors. ~ Herb Kohl

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop. ~ Jincy Willett

The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. ~ Stephen King

From the employees' standpoint, in 1935, Social Security was a big gamble. Employees would be required to participate in the program, contributing a percentage of their income for their entire adult working life. ~ Wayne Allard

I've always been a great believer that you have to keep producing new things in order to keep life interesting - not only for ourselves, but for the audience as well. That's really always been our principle and way of working. ~ Chris Squire

I try as best as I can to have a normal life. People recognise you, of course, and that's very strange. But I sort of leave my working life behind when I go home. That's my other world. ~ Saoirse Ronan

To be honest the work that a producer does is work that I've done for most of my working life. It's work that I started to do, for example, when I worked with Sally Potter on Orlando. We developed it together over five years. ~ Tilda Swinton

And you never even reported it. You should have reported it. I could have took fingerprints. I'd love to lock up them skinheads."
"What I'm reporting is the gun, my Sig Sauer." Dave said. "Hetzel will have it. I want it back."
"What did it cost you?" Rose said.
"That's not the point," Dave said. "It's the only gun I ever owned. I'm against guns. They give too many people power who have no right to it. Guns cancel out intelligence, reason, decency, civility, and put terror in their place. I got along without a gun most of my working life. But a man can't buck the odds forever. About five years back I bought the Sig Sauer. I'm used to it. And I don't know that I'm morally prepared to buy another one. ~ Joseph Hansen

The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon. ~ Paul Theroux

Do not just go through the day without pausing to ponder! You shall only retire wondering. ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

We with my husband [Joseph Millar] are often the first reader for one another's work, and we often also have the last word. We trust each other. We have our past working life in common, our recombined families, as well as our life as teachers, and we read much of the same literature and have similar esthetics, so there's a simpatico there. But we do disagree and that can be fruitful, even if it's not so great in the moment. ~ Dorianne Laux

I don't wear much make-up in my non-working life, though I love to dress up and put on a face for a special occasion. As I get older, I see less of the fantasy 'Indian' self I inherited from my father, and I see my mother looking back at me. ~ Diana Quick

Uh ... what can I say? Made money. Given a launch pad for a working life. Set a precedent I had no interest in following. Created expectations that I was not cut-out to match. Disappointed virtually all of my readers subsequently. But I like what I've done, and I stand by it all. ~ Alex Garland

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life. ~ James Joseph Sylvester

Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique. ~ Katharine Graham

I spend my working life pretending to be someone else. ~ Andrew Lincoln

I don't believe that you have a work life and a home life. I believe that you have one life, and either it's working or it isn't working. ~ Srikumar Rao

I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I've always read a lot of fiction - you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I'd try. ~ Anita Brookner

Swapping out the nine-to-five for a more agile, independent working life brings with it one other huge benefit - a channel for self-actualization. ~ Leah Busque

The problem is that the inner critic is actually an indispensable element of any writer's working life; it is the immune system, the necessary resistance against the toxicity of bad writing. Excessive self-doubt is therefore like a sort of autoimmune disease, caused by an overactive and overpowerful inner critic: the cure becomes the condition. (Mark O'Connell NYTimes) ~ Patricia Costa Viglucci

We must make working life more human. ~ Goran Persson

I've spent my whole working life standing up for workers. Didn't matter if it was the two trapped miners at Beaconsfield or professional netballers or indeed factory workers or construction workers. ~ Bill Shorten

In business, in the music world, people know that I can be very friendly and warm but that, after a certain moment, the business is closed. I like to be alone: in order to concentrate on my work, the social life does not exist. It has never existed for me, really. I have chosen instead the working life because I prefer that. ~ Pierre Boulez

To start your working life after you've graduated from school and university, it takes you a long time to get started in the real world. Today, kids are not out into the workforce until 27 or 30 years of age. By the time I was 30, I had six kids and 60 trucks. ~ Lindsay Fox

I'm angry because you think everything happened by chance but there are billions of people on this planet and I found you so if you're saying I could just as well have found someone else then I can't bear your bloody mathematics!" Her fists had been clenched. He stood there looking at her for several minutes. Then he said that he loved her. It was the first time. They never stopped arguing and they never slept apart; he spent an entire working life calculating probabilities and she was the most improbable person he ever met. She turned him upside-down. ~ Fredrik Backman

In East Germany it was very normal for a woman to go out and work even if she had children. A few weeks after giving birth women would return to their normal working life. We never had housewives in East Germany. ~ Christian Schwochow

Mine were informal mentors. They were all in my working life. ~ Laurence Fishburne

Today's ideal worker is not the anonymous shift worker but the enlightened genius who never stops working. ~ Miya Tokumitsu

I've never been happy in the way that I've been happy in this room, and in the studios," said Sophie. "I've never laughed so much, or learned so much, and everything I know about my job is because of the people here. Even you, Clive. And I'm worried that I'll spend the rest of my working life looking for an experience like this one, where everything clicks and everyone pushes you to do the best you can, better than anything you think you're capable of. ~ Nick Hornby

In Calvin's time, one might have had a hereditary occupation. And as recently as the 1970s, it was possible to compose a working life centered around the steady accumulation of experience, and be valued in the workplace for that experience; for what you have become. But, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has shown in his studies of contemporary work, it has become difficult to experience the repose of any such settled identity. The ideal of being experienced has given way to the ideal of being flexible. What is demanded is an all-purpose intelligence, the kind one is certified to have by admission to an elite university, not anything in particular that you might have learned along the way. You have to be ready to reinvent yourself at any time, like a good democratic Übermensch. And while in Calvin's time the threat of damnation might have been dismissed by some as a mere superstition, with our winner-take-all economy the risk of damnation has acquired real teeth. There is a real chance that you may get stuck at the bottom. ~ Matthew B. Crawford

I believe that the mindset that allows you to spend your working life thanking and congratulating people rather than being unpleasant to them is the mainstay of good leadership. ~ Tim Waterstone

Full employment does not mean literally no unemployment; that is to say, it does not mean that every man and woman in the country who is fit and free for work is employed productively every day of his or her working life ... Full employment means that unemployment is reduced to short intervals of standing by, with the certainty that very soon one will be wanted in one's old job again or will be wanted in a new job that is within one's powers. ~ William Beveridge

Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up. ~ Tom Hodgkinson

In our society competitive capitalism has put family life and working life on a collision course.In Canada statistics show that over 70 percent of the burden of caring for children, the aged, the disabled and the sick falls on women most of whom receive no pay for these very essential tasks.Normally speaking, it may be said that the forces of capitalism, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and thus increase the gap between them. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

I think if you are young and you have children, you still have so much to prove. When you have children later in life, you lose a bit of that urge for working. ~ Salma Hayek

You can't be a great mum and work the whole time necessarily; those two things aren't ideal. We have an awful lot to work on and to debate about in relation to our working lives, because it isn't working for a lot of people, particularly for a lot of women. ~ Emma Thompson

Most of us spend all our working life dreaming of doing nothing, then when we end up doing nothing, we long for something. When we have neither longing, I think that is what they call living for the moment. ~ Robert Black

Paul Works like a Farmer

When Silas and Timothy arrived in Corinth, Paul was very busy. He was always talking about the Scriptures with the Jews. He assured them that Jesus was the Christ. They argued and snubbed him. Paul shook the dust out of his cloak into their faces. "This means I'm through with you. You must answer to God for refusing the truth. I'm not to blame. Now I'm going to pay attention to the Gentiles."
One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision. "Don't be afraid," he said. "Speak and don't be silent. I'm with you and no one will harm you. Many people in Corinth belong to me."
Paul worked like a farmer among the people of Corinth. He planted the seeds of God's gospel for eighteen months. During that time, Paul wrote two letters to the believers in Thessalonica. He wanted them to live a holy, hard-working life. "Look forward to the day Jesus comes again," he wrote. ~ Daniel Partner

Over time, a noisy lifestyle and stress make you old. The stress, noise and rush that often accompany working life, family life and social life can be too much for your nervous system and brain, which also need rest and cleansing. ~ Thorbjorg Hafsteinsdottir

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in. ~ Barbara Tuchman

As is the case with all original creators, Charles Chaplin's working life was an amalgam of arrogant self-confidence and deflating self-doubt. ~ Garson Kanin

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women can't paint, women can't write ..."

She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr Bankes's glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them t ~ Virginia Woolf

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other. Age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities. Those they love are taken from them and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year. At length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last - the only unpoisoned gift ever had for them - and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they have existed – a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever. Then another myriad takes their place and copies all they did and goes along the same profitless road and vanishes as they vanished - to make room for another and another and a million other myriads to follow the same arid path through the same desert and accomplish what the first myriad and all the myriads that came after it accomplished - nothing! ~ Mark Twain

The only way we live beyond our lives is to connect and carve ourselves into the souls of those we love. ~ Michael John LaChiusa

If you have enthusiasm, boldness, and confidence, you are already a success. ~ Debasish Mridha

What happens is that the experience of writers working together and the idea of creative collaboration is so delightful, but it has been relegated to TV. ~ Akiva Goldsman

What is this life so full of care,
We don't have time to stand and stare. ~ W.H. Davies

The yogi should meditate on a firm seat, one that is clean - untainted by dirt or unspiritual vibrations of others. The thought or life force emanating from an individual saturates the objects he uses and his dwelling. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I want you to consider something, hon. What if it's not possible for you to ever become thin? What if there is no one day? What if this is your real life right now? What if you're already living it? ~ Sarai Walker

It is not the rich man's son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race for life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the dark horse in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office. ~ Andrew Carnegie

A brief whiff of her mother had come through a cracked window that opened to a weed-infested courtyard. It was a fragrance that almost spoke to her, saying, 'Yes, it was an unjust end to the life of a good man.' A man who had accepted gratitude in the place of love, and who knew Magdalena's heart would always remain with Ales's father. ~ Victoria Dougherty

I want to work for myself, and I do work for myself. I make plenty of money working for myself. ~ Adam Carolla

If this is the only life, then why I'm not just doing everything I want to do. ~ James Franco

Our contract with life is a contract that is brokered with fragility, and with sadness, and with anxiety. And if we're going to authentically and meaningfully be in this world, we cannot focus on one dimension of life and expect that focusing on that dimension is going to then give us a well-rounded life. ~ Susan David

He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life. ~ Ian McEwan

I've loved you every second of this life, and if I died, I'd love you every second of the next. ~ Rebecca Zanetti

I cannot live without books because books are my life. ~ Acacia

For me a film is at its best when you can start filling in the story with your own life experience. ~ Brad Pitt

Saving lives, one day at a time, just like always ~ Spencer Smith

You are the gatekeeper to your life and your home. You get to decide who or what comes in and what needs to stay out. If it doesn't contribute to the peaceful home you are now trying to have, then it should stay out. ~ Jen Grice

Life is a cowpat sandwich Jimbo.' he sighed 'with a very thin bread and lots of filling. ~ Mark Haddon

her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn't quite the 'interesting job' she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. ('One day a woman will be Prime Minister,' Pamela said. 'Maybe even in our lifetime.') Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress. Since '36 she'd been working in the Air Raid Precautions Department. 'You've not heard rumours then?' Pamela said. 'I'm a lowly squaw, I hear nothing but rumours.' 'Maurice can't say what he does,' Pamela grumbled. 'Couldn't ~ Kate Atkinson

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, trowing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. ~ Barbara Kingsolve