Work And Life Quotes

1. "...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "We have made a problem for ourselves by confusing the intelligible with the fixed. We think that making sense out of life is impossible unless the flow of events can somehow be fitted into a framework of rigid forms. To be meaningful, life must be understandable in terms of fixed ideas and laws, and these in turn must correspond to unchanging and eternal realities behind the shifting scene. But if this what "making sense out of life" means, we have set ourselves the impossible task of making fixity out of flux."
Author: Alan Wilson Watts

3. "Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.I have sent up my gladness on wings, to be lost in the blue of the sky.I have run and leaped with the rain, I have taken the wind to my breast.My cheek like a drowsy child to the face of the earth I have pressed.Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.I have kissed young love on the lips, I have heard his song to the end.I have struck my hand like a seal in the loyal hand of a friend.I have known the peace of heaven, the comfort of work done well.I have longed for death in the darkness and risen alive out of hell.Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.I give a share of my soul to the world where my course is run.I know that another shall finish the task I must leave undone.I know that no flower, nor flint was in vain on the path I trod.As one looks on a face through a window, through life I have looked on God.Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die."
Author: Amelia Josephine Burr

4. "I feel that I've worked with a lot of interesting people, and I have no regrets. I'm just curious about what I might have done if I'd had people in my life then who did explain what the publicity game was."
Author: Annabella Sciorra

5. "Delirious as it can be, sex is only one kind of intimacy, and yet has become the cultural catchment area for all kinds of needs because our understanding of intimacy is so poor. Brutal work schedules, related geographic isolation, and the concomitant fracturing of families has meant that there is little time for intimacy, and even less to teach the necessary skills. But intimacy, the axis of romance, is slow, based on the sharing of a life rather than show. In terms of intimacy, folding laundry together or sharing the feeding of a child can have more impact than the most extravagant bouquet."
Author: Antonella Gambotto Burke

6. "It is very telling what we don't hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: "The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president." Or: "He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure." Or: "She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day." Or: "He never made it to his kid's Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time." Or: "While she didn't have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night." Or: "His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared." Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh."
Author: Arianna Huffington

7. "In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter."
Author: Azar Nafisi

8. "When there were no customers, he thought about geometry. He tried to perform the Pythagorean Theorem on the light fixture above him, given his estimate of its circumference, but he failed. He wanted to be good at math. But he just wasn't. He wanted so badly for the math club to accept him, but to them he was a loser. During rush week they battered him blue with yard sticks; they tied him to a table naked and made him prove problems involving half circles before a huge swinging protractor cut him in half; they forced him to continually calculate the remaining volume of the kegs he had to drink, working it out by hand as he was held upside down. After he didn't get in the club, they had started ganging up on him every day, sticking his head in the toilet and stealing his lunch money. Business was slow at the moment, and he thought about ending his life in the kitchen appliance aisle."
Author: Benson Bruno

9. "We don't want to be uncomfortable. We want a quick and dirty "how-to" list for happiness. I don't fit that bill. Never have. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to skip over the hard stuff, but it just doesn't work. We don't change, we don't grow, and we don't move forward without the work. If we really want to live a joyful, connected, and meaningful life, we must talk about things that get in the way."
Author: Brené Brown

10. "My mother was a secretary that elevated herself to having her own international company, my father elevated himself to an NBA player and perennial all-star. So I learned from my parents that it's about hard work, about both of them getting their education, putting people first and leading a life of integrity."
Author: Brian J. White

11. "When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it!"
Author: Charlotte Joko Beck

12. "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."
Author: Chimnese Davids

13. "Day-to-day life is a lot of work. I work a lot on stand-up stuff, and then day-to-day life and, you know, just living. It's always different. Try to work out, try to stay in shape, and try to have some fun."
Author: Chris Tucker

14. "I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. Buying myself a drink in the smaller warrens below, in all their ethnic variety (and willingness to keep odd and late hours, and provide plentiful ice cubes, and free matchbooks in contrast to English parsimony in these matters), I felt the same thing in a different way. The balance between the macro and the micro, the heroic scale and the human scale, has never since ceased to fascinate and charm me. Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think—made me think for many years—that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

15. "I try to combine my work with my family, that's what I aspire to. I don't say that's the only thing. It's not all work and family, because otherwise you would be saying no to the many other things in life and there are many other things."
Author: Connie Nielsen

16. "Contentment is a state of mind and body when the two work in harmony, and there is no friction. The mind is at peace, and the body also. The two are sufficient to themselves. Happiness is elusive -- coming perhaps once in a life-time -- and approaching ectasy."
Author: Daphne Du Maurier

17. "Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a human mind out of that iron cage of mistrust, is a sacrifice. The martyr who gives up everything, who abandons all personal gain, who lays down his life for the good of those outside his group. He becomes a symbol all can rally around. So instead of trying to make a selfish, violent primate somehow empathize with the whole world, which is impossible, you only need to get him to remember and love the martyr. As one is forgotten, another must replace it."
Author: David Wong

18. "As a teenager, I always intended to do my homework. But when the supplicant dead come to you for justice and you also have occasional prophetic dreams, life tends to interfere with your studies."
Author: Dean Koontz

19. "But that can't work, can it?" Said Richard. "If we do that, then this won't have happened. Don't we generate all sorts of paradoxes?"Reg stirred himself from thought. "No worse than many that exist already," he said. "If the universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if its done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make. That isn't to say if you get involved in a paradox a few things won't strike you as being very odd, but if you've got through life without that already happening to you, then I don't know which universe you've been living in, but it isn't this one"
Author: Douglas Adams

20. "She followed the pleasure where it led. She had no weight, no name, no thoughts, no history. Then came a burst of phosphorescence, as though a firework had discharged behind her eyes, and it was over. She felt quiet and warm. For the first conscious moment of her life, her mind was free from wonder, free from worry, free from work or puzzlement. Then, from the middle of that marvelous furred stillness, a thought took shape, took hold, took over. I shall have to do this again."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

21. "After a while, meaning and implication detach themselves from everything. One can be a father and assume no obligations, it follows that one can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all. Pretty soon you can add friend, acquaintance, co-worker, and just about anyone else to the long list of people who seem to be part of your life, though there is no code of conduct that they must adhere to. Pretty soon, it seems unreasonable to be bothered or outraged by much of anything because, well, what did you expect? In a world where the core social unit - the family - is so dispensable, how much can anything else mean?"
Author: Elizabeth Wurtzel

22. "Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding 'rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture, which has no way of grasping why they really suffer, or what they lack in life."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

23. "Had I life to live over, I see now where I could do more; but neighbour, believe me, my highest aspiration is to be a clean, thrifty housekeeper, a bountiful cook, a faithful wife, a sympathetic mother. That is life work for any woman, and to be a good woman is the greatest thing on earth. Never mind about the ladies; if you can honestly say of me, she is a good woman, you have paid me the highest possible tribute..... To be a good wife and mother is the end toward which I aspire. To hold the respect and love of my husband is the greatest object of my life."
Author: Gene Stratton Porter

24. "When true happiness shows up, the ego is bored with it: It's too plain, too ordinary, and it doesn't leave us feeling special or above the fray. It doesn't take away our problems, which is the ego's idea of happiness. The ego wants no more difficulties: no ore sickness, no more need for money, no more work, no more bad feelings, only unending pleasure and bliss. Such perfection is the ego's idea of a successful life. However, the happiness the ego dreams of will never be attained by anyone. The ego denies the reality of this dimension, where challenges are necessary to evolution and blissful states and pleasure come and go."
Author: Gina Lake

25. "Obedience to commandments is the way we build a foundation of truth. Here is the way that works, in words so simple that a child could understand: The truth of most worth is to know God our Heavenly Father, His Son, Jesus Christ, and Their plan for us to have eternal life with Them in families. When God communicates that priceless truth to us, He does it by the Spirit of Truth. We have to ask for it in prayer. Then He sends us a small part of that truth by the Spirit. It comes to our hearts and minds. It feels good, like the light from the sun shining through the clouds on a dark day. He sends..."
Author: Henry B. Eyring

26. "Sometimes, in a summer morning,having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrisetill noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around orflitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in atmy west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distanthighway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasonslike corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of thehands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, butso much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientalsmean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, Iminded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light somework of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothingmemorable is accomplished."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

27. "I realised I'd been spoiled at Liverpool. We were used to winning. In Italy I grew up as a person. I didn't enjoy the football, mind. It was very defensive, but I became a better player because of the work I had to do around the box. Off the pitch, I learned about what to eat and what to drink to be successful, and I learned about life."
Author: Ian Rush

28. "Here's the way it works. You're going to find yourself at a crossroads.. There's going to be a dcision you'll have to make, an action to be taken or not, a choice between polar opposites. All of what you are and what you have been and what you could be will be measured on your decision. And the consequences? They don't just affect you. They affect everyone. This is not simple life and death - it's about eternity. Yours. Others'. Do not understimate how far this goes."
Author: J.R. Ward

29. "Satisfaction in life doesn't jump on you, you work for it, you earn it. You will not sit in a place, fold your hands and expect to be satisfied with life."
Author: Jaachynma N.E. Agu

30. "When the ships had lifted, they returned across the river to the silence of death. Then his grandfather told him, "Many fine things your father had planned for you: learning and useful work and a life of satisfaction and peace. Do you recall this?""Yes, Grandfather.""The learning you shall have. You will learn patience and resource, the ability of your hands and your mind. You will have useful work: the destruction of evil men. What work could be more useful? This is Beyond; you will find that your work is never done—so therefore you may never know life of peace. However, I guarantee you ample satisfaction, for I will teach you to crave the blood of these men more than the flesh of woman."The old man had been as good as his word."
Author: Jack Vance

31. "I felt for a long time that this is what I want to do so I'm happy at this point to just take my time and work on projects that I feel strongly about, and the rest of the time just live my life."
Author: Jennifer Connelly

32. "Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.' What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried into our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic."
Author: Jonah Lehrer

33. "I want to do good work, but having kids and a life outside of that is important, too. If you don't have anybody around who loves you, then what's it all for? You're just lonely in the end."
Author: Josh Duhamel

34. "They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked having a second shadow, enjoyed showing Nell things, explaining how they worked and why. Nell was a big one for asking why-why did the sun hide at night, why didn't the fire flames leap out of the gate, why didn't the river get bored and run the other way?-and Lil loved supplying answers, watching as understanding dawned on Nell's little face. For the first time in her life, Lil felt useful, needed, whole."
Author: Kate Morton

35. "Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside."
Author: Lawren Harris

36. "Fiona says that I have trouble moving on. That I cling to the past...I knew that I would miss it. I'd miss the way my life used to be when I worked there. I always miss the way my life used to be, and the best way to prevent that is to not change my life very much."
Author: Leila Sales

37. "I kept on trying to use so many media and ideas in my work because our horizon is so vast and Indian culture is so rich that I think what we are today, culturally, we have a unique position and I don't think one lifetime is enough to encompass it."
Author: M. F. Husain

38. "Stripped of the kind of judgments that are at the very heart of the idea of "credit", shot through with bad faith, [the mortgage broker's] work is now predicated on irresponsibility, rooted in the absence of community. Whatever lingering fiduciary consciousness he may have has become a liability, given the general rush to irresponsibility by his competitors. The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life."
Author: Matthew B. Crawford

39. "Since I've been in an actor, I've lived in Italy, in London, in Stockholm - I had the fortune of working in different locations. If you live someplace long enough, you acquire slightly different systems of thought, and it influences your outlook on life. I just slowly adapted the way I speak."
Author: Matthew Settle

40. "In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... There is this sort of dialectic that you could tease out, that even in this overdeveloped late-capitalist world, that boredom was still this kind of critical energy that you could work on and try to theorize and then act on, to find other kinds of belonging, other kinds of desire, other kinds of life."
Author: McKenzie Wark

41. "And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well, Walter, and you must be instructed how to Cast them with due Care. It is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe (and I turn this Thought over in my Mind: what Life is there which is not a Portmanteau of Shaddowes and Chimeras?). I build in the Day to bring News of the Night and of Sorrowe, I continued, and then I broke off for Walter's sake."
Author: Peter Ackroyd

42. "I ask for a moment's indulgence to sit by thy side. The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards. Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil. Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove. A Moments IndulgenceNow it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure."
Author: Rabindranath Tagore

43. "If you work and do pure research in this industry as long as I have – and you actually pay attention and do your homework, then this naked and raw truth stands out -> The supplement world of cancer-fighters, CAD-preventers, health-promoters, magic-water – AND/OR - muscle-builders, fat-burners and weight-loss agents – all of them – already have an over-crowded mass grave-yard of previous magic bullets that would supposedly make your life and/or body better – Yes, so promising and heavily promoted "this" era – but so dead and gone the next – leaving in their wake a trail of mass-consumer confusion – but also leaving their actual intention -> a new generation of passive consumers – those who can't differentiate the sizzle from the steak. Or as W.C. Fields put it so long ago – "There's a sucker born every minute." -> There isn't a supplement on the planet that marks the difference between ‘health or ill-health' – or between ‘fit or fat.' - or between ‘results and stagnation."
Author: Scott Abel

44. "One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away."
Author: Stephen Hawking

45. "When you focus your thinking to the positive influences in your life, they will grow stronger and more influential every day. Remind yourself often of what works well and why, and you'll naturally find ways to make lots of other things work well too. The most efficient way to enjoy more success in life is not to obsess yourself with what hasn't worked in the past, but instead to extend and expand upon the success you already know. For more tips, read "The Angel Affect."
Author: The Angel Affect

46. "There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?"
Author: Thomas Mann

47. "I'm trying to reestablish my career and do great work and give my kids the life they deserve."
Author: Tom Sizemore

48. "I think I'm very interested in people, in the way our minds work and how we navigate through the experience that is life. Very interested in people's struggles and their choices and their regrets and joys. I'm very interested in the human animal."
Author: Victor Salva

49. "How, then,' I hear you ask, 'shall I attain my end, whether it be Christian love, socialism, or American democracy?' Your Christian love and your socialism and your American democracy are what you do each day, your manner of thinking each hour, of embracing your life companion and loving your child; they are your attitude of social responsibility towards your work, and your determination not to become like the crushers of life you so hate."
Author: Wilhelm Reich

50. "Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the secret of fulfillment is "to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become."
Author: Winifred Gallagher

Work And Life Quotes Pictures