Quotes About Jobs

The only reason we have alarm clocks

We recently celebrated Labor Day by taking the day off from work, but it didn’t take long before we got back into the daily grind of the workweek. Love them or hate them, we all have jobs to do and they’re usually the reason we tolerate an alarm clock wailing at us during ungodly times of the morning. These quotes are about jobs and how we handle them.

1. “I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.’” -Toni Morrison

2. “The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one.” -Oscar Wilde

3. “When you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.” -Theodore Roosevelt

4. “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” -Mark Twain

5. “You can quit your job, but you can’t quit your calling.” -Lissa Rankin

6. “Getting fired is nature’s way of telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place.” -Hal Lancaster

7. “Don’t pick a job with a great vacation time. Pick one that doesn’t need escaping from.” -Unknown

8. “There’s a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over — and to let go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its value.” -Ellen Goodman

9. “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

10. “Even though your time on the job is temporary, if you do a good enough job, your work there will last forever.” -Idowu Koyenikan

11. “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’” -Martin Luther King Jr.

12. “Your job is not just to do what your parents say, what your teachers say, what society says, but to figure out what your heart calling is and be led by that.” -Oprah Winfrey

13. “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.” -Vince Lombardi

14. “Work takes on new meaning when you feel you are pointed in the right direction. Otherwise, it’s just a job, and life is too short for that.” -Tim Cook

15. “There is nothing like a concrete life plan to weigh you down. Because if you always have one eye on some future goal, you stop paying attention to the job at hand, miss opportunities that might arise, and stay fixedly on one path, even when a better, newer course might have opened up.” -Indra K. Nooyi

16. “There is no future in any job. The future lies in the person who holds the job.” -George Crane

17. “Be thankful for problems. If they were less difficult, someone with less ability might have your job.” -Jim Lovell

18. “There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?” -Warren Buffet

19. “I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.” -Haruki Murakami

20. “Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities in blessings.” -William Arthur Ward

21. “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” -Aristotle

22. “Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

23. “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” -Francis Bacon

24. “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.” -Drew Carey

25. “It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.” -Muhammad Ali

26. “I like to reinvent myself — it’s part of my job.” -Karl Lagerfeld

27. “We’re just human beings. In the end, you do your job. I do my job in the best way I can.” -Mohamed Salah

28. “Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I’m doing, I always tell myself, ‘You can do better than this.’” -Dr. Seuss

29. “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” -Red Adair

30. “If to love each other is the job, then the happy life is the salary.” -Toba Beta 31. “People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition.” -Bob Nelson

32. “Working at a job you don’t like is the same as going to prison every day, my father used to say. He was right. I felt imprisoned by an impressive title, travel, perks, and a good salary. On the inside, I was miserable and lonely, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I spent weekends working on reports no one read, and I gave presentations that I didn’t care about. It made me feel like a sellout and, worse, a fraud. Now set free, like any inmate I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.” -Kathleen Flinn

33. “That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.” -Charles Bukowski

34. “Leave your ego at the door every morning, and just do some truly great work. Few things will make you feel better than a job brilliantly done.” -Robin S. Sharma

35. “They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job.” -Brian Clough

36. “No man ever listened himself out of a job.” -Calvin Coolidge

37. “It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn’t.” -Martin Van Buren

38. “Every job I take, within minutes I’m thinking, ‘I can’t do this.’ I think it’s what makes me work. People think I just swagger in and do it. But I doubt myself all the time. It’s what pushes me, what makes me work harder. The older I get, the less I take for granted.” -Ray Winstone

39. “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.” -Simon Sinek

40. “There is a lot of stuff we can’t control, but it is completely in our power to decide what the definition of a good job is. That’s up to us.” -Mike Rowe

41. “True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job anyhow, that’s what courage is.” -Norman Schwarzkopf

42. “Take your job seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously.” -Alex Trebek

43. “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.” -Dale Carnegie

44. “Quitting a job can be like an exorcism where you cast out a demon. The demon is the foreign spirit who occupies you through your occupation.” -Bryant McGill 45. “Cat, I’ll let you in on a little secret. We don’t all love our jobs every day. And doing something you have passion for doesn’t make the work part of it any easier…It just makes you less likely to quit.” -Kate Jacobs

46. “Scratch a dog and you’ll find a permanent job.” -Franklin P. Jones

47. “Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home…it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.” -Chuck Palahniuk

48. “Do your job and demand your compensation, but in that order.” -Cary Grant

49. “If you think your boss is stupid, remember: You wouldn’t have a job if he was any smarter.” -John Gotti

50. “If heaven really exists: then heaven is the job, hell is unemployment, while life is merely an interview.” -Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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Sources:

27 Quotes That Will Inspire You To Have Work You Love. Inc. Magazine. https://www.inc.com/laura-garnett/27-quotes-that-will-inspire-you-to-have-work-you-love.html

28 Quotes About Loving Your Job. Indeed.com. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/quotes-about-loving-your-job

35 Inspirational Job Quotes. CollegeGrad.com. https://collegegrad.com/jobsearch/35-inspirational-job-quotes-for-job-seekers

50+ Job Quotes That Could Change How You Feel About Your Career. The Muse. https://www.themuse.com/advice/50-inspirational-career-quotes

70 Quotes about Jobs and Life to Motivate You in 2022. teambuilding.com. https://teambuilding.com/blog/quotes-about-jobs-and-life

Job Quotes. BrainyQuote. https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/job-quotes

Job Quotes. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/job

Job Sayings and Quotes. Wise Sayings. https://www.wisesayings.com/job-quotes/

Quotes About Hating Your Job. LiveAbout. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/quotes-about-hating-your-job-2062838