quotations about work
Many companies see happiness at work as an intangible "nice to have", rather than an important organisational priority. While you can't force employees to be happy -- or control every factor that contributes to happiness -- it's still possible to create the conditions that will help to promote happiness and positivity at work.
ROBERT HALF
"Happiness at work -- is it natural or necessary?", Business Zone, March 31, 2017
Inter-cubicle friendship is every bit as good for your health and your output as an ergonomically correct ball chair. Even in our furiously multi-tasking world, work should still come with a good dose of play. And, okay, maybe some free pretzels too.
KATIE UNDERWOOD
"Why developing friendships at work is so important", Canadian Business, January 27, 2016
When he worked, he really worked. But when he played, he really PLAYED.
DR. SEUSS
The King's Stilts
Slow work produces fine goods.
CHINESE PROVERB
See that bunch of loafers on the street corner. They seldom work, and how they live no one can tell. Are they happy? Nay, nay; the good boxes on which they sit testify to their restlessness, for they have tried to while away their long hours by whittling them, when there was nothing else on hand to help pass the time. Certainly the idle, yawning, gaping, stretching loafer is not an ideal of a happy life.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
Most work, let's face it, is not the least bit loveable, and a good deal of it is barely tolerable. And this isn't going to change, no matter how many Steve Jobs quotes we share on Facebook. Tough, low-wage work isn't going away. In fact, jobs in the service and care industries are booming. But a "do what you love" ethos hides such work, and the conditions of its workers, by keeping individuals focused on the self and the belief that there is bliss to be found in a job if only they strive harder than those around them.
SIMON CASTLES
"Do what you love mantra devalues hard work", The Age, February 9, 2016
If you don't find a way to do something as work that is fulfilling and enjoyable, then your life is going to be really sad.
RUDOLPH GIULIANI
interview, May 3, 2003
The chances of a man's succeeding who does not love his work are very small. For all success costs labor.
FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP
Success: A Course in Moral Instruction
Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
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.
L. P. JACKS
Education Through Recreation
The humblest workman has his place,
Which no one else can fill.
MAUD LINDSAY
"The Little Gray Pony", Mother Stories
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
ARISTOTLE
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul
If we look at things from a results level -- what hours one puts in -- which is, I think, where we're going in the future of work, then we're going to have to balance our lives a little better. And, therefore, the organisational challenge really will be how we facilitate people to do that.
MARGOT SLATTERY
"Data is absolutely essential to the future of work", Silicon Republic, March 23, 2017
Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
Lust
There is no substitute for hard work.
THOMAS EDISON
Life
The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
PAUL LAFARGUE
The Right to Be Lazy
Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.
KARL MARX
"Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic
Have you beheld a man skillful in his work? Before kings is where he will station himself; he will not station himself before commonplace men.
SOLOMON
Proverbs 22:29
The truth is, any of us in a position to choose and chase work out of love do so from a place of relative privilege. Overwhelmingly, work in the world is done for income, and income alone, and love doesn't even get a look-in.
SIMON CASTLES
"Do what you love mantra devalues hard work", The Age, February 9, 2016
Every man is better for a period of work under the open sky.
HENRY FORD
My Life and Work