We've all heard that hard work pays off.

But throughout your professional life, your career will throw you a wide variety of ups and downs. Stress, change, problem coworkers, varying degrees of inspiration; the fact is that that we could all use a little guidance in our work lives at one time or another.

Do you aspire to building big things? Do you have what it takes to bring your professional dreams to life? Let us help you get through the good times and the bad with the following quotes for your working life. The following 130 quotes about work will help get you there.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

Aristotle

My work is a game, a very serious game.

M. C. Escher

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

Horace Mann

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Thomas Jefferson

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

Robert Frost

I've always believed that if you put in the work, the results will come. I don't do things half-heartedly. Because I know if I do, then I can expect half-hearted results.

Michael Jordan

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Theodore Roosevelt

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Confucius

People forget how fast you did a job - but they remember how well you did it.

Howard W. Newton

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

John Ruskin

...in order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.

John Ruskin

Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves, those who work hard and play hard.

Colin Powell

An honest god's the noblest work of man.

Samuel Butler

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.

Henri Frederic Amiel

I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun.

Thomas A. Edison

If you neglect your work, you will dislike it; if you do it well, you will enjoy it.

Sir Philip Sidney

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Bertrand Russell

Carob works on the principle that, when mixed with the right combination of fats and sugar, it can duplicate chocolate in color and texture. Of course, the same can be said of dirt.

Sandra Boynton

If you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won't have to work.

Ogden Nash

Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced.

Bob Black

A great work of art is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.

Nadia Boulanger

Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.

Robert Half

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Henry David Thoreau

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

Henri Matisse

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.

Julia Cameron

Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

Robert M. Pirsig

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Walter Bagehot

I need so much time for doing nothing that I have no time for work.

Pierre Reverdy

In all the work we do, our most valuable asset can be the attitude of self-examination. It is forgivable to make mistakes, but to stand fast behind a wall of self-righteousness and make the same mistake twice is not forgivable.

Dale E. Turner

Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts will inevitably bring about right results.

James Allen

During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.

Henri Cartier bresson

For a woman to get half as much credit as a man, she has to work twice as hard, and be twice as smart. Fortunately, that isn't difficult.

Charlotte Whitton

It´s easy to make things look hard but hard to make things look easy.

Helene Lagerberg

Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

Voltaire

A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.

Voltaire

Nobody can be successful unless he loves his work.

David Sarnoff

You know that it is only through work that you can achieve anything, either in college or in the world.

Charles W. Eliot

I learned the value of hard work by working hard.

Margaret Mead

I am an eyewitness to the ways in which people relate to themselves and to each other, and my work is a way of scooping and ladling that experience.

Richard Neutra

By the work one knows the workmen.

Jean de La Fontaine

Basically, I no longer work for anything but the sensation I have while working.

Albert Giacometti

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Angela Davis

Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.

Walter Gropius

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

Robert Benchley

I don't pretend to tell people how to live their lives other than to do the right thing and work hard. Everything else should take care of itself.

Dave Anderson

One way to make sure everyone gets to work on time would be to have 95 parking spaces for every 100 employees.

Michael Iapoce

There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone - many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long.

Richard Nelson Bolles

I have younger friends who don't work, and they aren't doing so well. My secret is to keep going, keep working.

Les Paul

Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.

Hesiod

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.

Ogden Nash

I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.

Mother Jones

Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.

Sam Ewing

No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.

Olive Schreiner

I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating.

W. Somerset Maugham

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word-excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

Pearl S. Buck

Do you mortify? Do you make it your daily work? Be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you.

John Owen

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

Louis Nizer

Works before conversion cannot engage God, and works after conversion can not satisfy God - all the endeavor and labor of the creature will never procure it.

Thomas Manton

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.

Saint Augustine

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

Richard Bach

Your hand is never the worse for doing its own work.

Welsh Proverb

Working for a federal agency was like trying to dislodge a prune skin from the roof of the mouth. More enterprise went into the job than could be justified by the results.

Caskie Stinnett

Pay me for my work but I don't do it for the money.

Vanna Bonta

I loved the game. I loved the competition. But I never had any fun. I never enjoyed it. All hard work all the time.

Carl Yastrzemski

Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.

Johnny Carson

Some guys they just give up living, others start dying little by little piece by piece, some guys come home from work and wash up, and go racing in the streets.

Bruce Springsteen

Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?

Edgar Bergen

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

David C. Mccullough

Never stand begging for what you have the power to earn.

Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Dare to be honest and fear no labor.

Robert Burns

The fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people who have become wealthy have become so thanks to work they found profoundly absorbing. The long term study of people who eventually became wealthy clearly reveals that their "luck" arose from.

Srully Blotnick

Work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

James Whistler

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

Anatole France

A great demand today is that work should be interesting. This is a recent development in human history, and workers in field or factory over the centuries would have been greatly puzzled by it.

George Watson

To say 'well done' to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.

Phillip Brooks

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Mary Oliver

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Jean Cocteau

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anyone who works is a fool. I don't work - I merely inflict myself upon the public.

Robert Morley

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Goodbye Mr. Zanuck: it certainly has been a pleasure working at 16th Century Fox.

Jean Renoir

Getting fired is nature's way to telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place.

Hal Lancaster

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Sir William Osler

He who labours as he prays lifts his heart to God with his hands.

Bernard Of Clairvaux

Absence of occupation is not rest; a mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.

William Cowper

Whenever it is in any way possible, every boy and girl should choose as his life work some occupation which he should like to do anyhow, even if he did not need the money.

William Lyon Phelps

If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism at least in the sense of this work is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or a.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

Peter F. Drucker

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.

Margot Fonteyn

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you must win their hearts to have them work with you.

Merle Shain

The secret of greatness is simple: do better work than any other man in your field - and keep on doing it.

Wilfred A. Peterson

Find something you love to do and you'll never have to work a day in your life.

Harvey Mackay

Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.

Walter Chrysler

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Thomas Carlyle

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

Marian Wright Edelman

I make a lot of money, but I don't want to talk about that. I work very hard and I'm worth every cent.

Naomi Campbell

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.

Henry J. Kaiser

Those who work most for the world's advancement are the ones who demand least.

Henry L. Doherty

I'm probably the only guy who worked for Stengel before and after he was a genius.

Warren Spahn

It's not the hours you put in your work that counts, it's the work you put in the hours.

Sam Ewing

It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies.

Bette Davis

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

Bob Black

A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.

W. Somerset Maugham

Your faith will perform miracles especially when you get your hands and feet involved.

Gordon B. Hinkley

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

Alfred Kazin

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.

Lane Kirkland

Leaders aren't born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

Vince Lombardi

When a work lifts your spirits and inspires bold and noble thoughts in you, do not look for any other standard to judge by: the work is good, the product of a master craftsman.

Jean De La Bruyere

Work is the price which is paid for reputation.

Baltasar Gracian

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

Abraham Lincoln

I don't get off on romantic parts. But I often think if I had had my dental work done early on, well, maybe.

Morgan Freeman

A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Dorothy L. Sayers

The best part of one's life is the working part, the creative part. Believe me, I love to succeed... However, the real spiritual and emotional excitement is in the doing.

Garson Kanin

Today a thousand doors of enterprise are open to you, inviting you to useful work. To live at this time is an inestimable privilege, and a sacred obligation devolves upon you to make right use of your opportunities. Today is the day in which to attempt and achieve something worthwhile.

Grenville Kleiser

Why do I like racing? I was too lazy to work and too chicken to steal.

Kyle Petty

Men are not human beings,they are human doings.

Warren Farrell

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'

Don Marquis

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

Anne Frank

It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

'Tis better that a man's own works, than that another man's words should praise him.

L. Estrange

Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.

Elbert Hubbard

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

James M. Barrie

Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?

Jean Paul Getty

The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.

Maxine Hong Kingston

A fair return for their labor so as to have good homes, good clothing, good food.

Daniel Webster

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

William Kennedy

Those who first oppose a good work, seize it and make it their own, when the corner - stone is laid and memorial tablets are erected.

Edgar Lee Masters

This work is a torture on the rump but a joy to the heart.

Eduardo Galeano