Career Quotes

“Once lay down the rule that the job comes first and you throw that job open to every individual, man or woman, fat or thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, who is able to do that job better than the rest of the world.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“Doing something later is not automatically the same as doing something better”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“When one door closes another opens but all too often there is a long hallway in between. ”
― Rick Jarow, The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide: The Inner Path to Finding Your Work in the World

“Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.

A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid.”
― Jessie B. Rittenhouse

“A world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said "What will you be? What will you do?" I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.”
― Daniel Mason, A Far Country

“If you're male, and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Be careful what you get good at doin', cuz you'll be doin' it for the rest of your life.”
― Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

“Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape.”
― Nigel Slater, Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

“Out of the current confusion of ideals and and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity.”
― Matthew B. Crawford

“Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“It's not that I want to work for Williams-Sonoma, per se, it's just that you guys have the money and I don't.”
― FAXBoy

“Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures . . . a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“The first test of ability and intelligence is to find a field of endeavor in which profits are large and risks small.”
― James Gould Cozzens, The Just And The Unjust: A Gripping Crime Mystery – Classic Police Drama in a Small-Town Murder Trial

“what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an ‘appointment’) which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Being in charge of your work life doesn't mean you always move with assurance and sublime self-confidence; it means you keep moving, continuing on your own path, even when you feel shaky and uncertain.”
― Charlotte Beers, I'd Rather Be in Charge: A Legendary Business Leader's Roadmap for Achieving Pride, Power, and Joy at Work

“In business as well as in everything else, you're in business to spread love.  Your agency should spread love,  your screenplay should spread love, your store should spread love, your life should spread love.  The key to a successful career is realizing that it s not separate from the rest of your life, but is rather an extension of your most basic self and your most basic self is love.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

“The main character, Gene Moore, is shown how much of his identity is wrapped up in his career and potential in that career. When he comes home from war no longer able to see himself as a baseball prospect, he isn't sure who he is. This is thoroughly reinforced every time one of his acquaintances identifies him by baseball or inquires about his status. How much of our identity and worth is wrapped up in our job title or the one we are aspiring to?”
― Gary Moore, Playing With the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams

“It's a long journey, filled with highs and lows, but if we find something we love doing and are able to create a way to do it for the rest of our lives, it's all worth it.”
― Kio Briggs, Living Free: The High Philosophy

“Seems an awful waste to be in the same country and do nothing about it.”
― Sheila O'Flanagan, If You Were Me

“If you’re too sad, you can’t work. If you’re too happy, you realize you don’t need the work.

So they keep you right there in the middle. ‘Okay.’

It’s a trap. A golden cage where nothing hurts, but nothing bleeds either.

The world wants you numb because numb people buy toaster ovens.

Screw ‘okay.’ Go get your heart broken. Go get into a fistfight. Feel something, you, numb bastard.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I have spent half of my life trying to play the good guy.

You know

Less loud. Less blunt.

Less chaotic, less of an emotional trainwreck, biting my own tongue so I don’t scare the civilians.

But love isn’t supposed to be a fucking censorship board. If you have to carve out my own wild, blunt, broken heart just to fit into their neat little box of 'easy to love,'

It ain't worth the squeeze.

Love is the riot. It is the storm.

and I am officially done apologizing for the noise.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Satisfied and successful women don’t let fear or expectations dictate their next move. They pause. They contemplate. They rewrite the rules.”
― Shannon Flanagan, Choose - don't chase - Your Career: Rewrite Your Transitions on Your Own Terms

“Good work is not enough.”
― Adam Knox, Here's Where to Start: Managing Up: How to work with the people above you, without losing yourself in the process

“Aim so high that your effort transforms you, even before your success does.”
― Ashok Veda

“But I think all women, no matter how brilliant they are, always worry. It’s frustrating and probably unhealthy, but it’s the truth.”
― Sheila O'Flanagan, If You Were Me

“I used to think I knew exactly what I wanted. But it didn’t turn out like that.”
― Sheila O'Flanagan, If You Were Me

“Whereas the well thumbed copies of my favourite books are like the warm embrace of a good friend.”
― Sheila O'Flanagan, If You Were Me

“What’s this obsession with perfect weddings? Why am I the only woman in the world who thinks that as long as the bride and groom end up as husband and wife, everything else is pretty much unimportant?”
― Sheila O'Flanagan, If You Were Me

“Some leaders build companies. Some build teams. Very few rebuild themselves."
— Becoming Unbreakable”
― Mantha Bala, Becoming Unbreakable: Learnings from Life's Toughest Transitions, The AmpGro Transition Series - Book 3