Career Quotes

“Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.”
― Ayn Rand

“A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night”
― Marilyn Monroe

“When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

“What would you do if you weren't afraid?”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life'.”
― Maya Angelou

“Done is better than perfect.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“Persistence. Perfection. Patience. Power. Prioritize your passion. It keeps you sane.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Even though your time on the job is temporary, if you do a good enough job, your work there will last forever.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.”
― Alan Watts

“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”
― Bill Watterson

“We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“I have dozens of loyal fans! Baker's dozens! …they come in thirteens.”
― Felicia Day

“Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“If you're waiting until you feel talented enough to make it, you'll never make it.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Fortune does favor the bold and you'll never know what you're capable of if you don't try.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

“It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“Whatever you do, do it with purpose. Being focused is not something to be ashamed of. It is something to be proud of. When you know what are you are doing and have a clear vision of where you are going, you will not need to chase opportunities. Opportunities will seek you. Happiness will chase you. And, instead of being a choice, you will be the one choosing.”
― Najwa Zebian, Mind Platter

“The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is not as much about who you used to be, as it is about who you choose to be.”
― Sanhita Baruah

“We grow up with such an idealistic view on how our life should be; love, friendships, a career or even the place we will live ~ only to age and realise none of it is what you expected & reality is a little disheartening, when you've reached that realisation; you have learnt the gift of all, any new beginning can start now and if you want anything bad enough you'll find the courage to pursue it with all you have. The past doesn't have to be the future, stop making it so.”
― Nikki Rowe

“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, The Friday Night Knitting Club

“No, scratch the word "career." Careers are for people who wish to advance. I only want to survive, draw a paycheck. ”
― Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed

“I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“Don't confuse having a career with having a life.”
― Hillary Rodham Clinton

“It’s the people we hardly know, and not our closest friends, who will improve our lives most dramatically”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman