Work Forty Quotes

#1. Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?

Jay Samit

#2. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

W. H. Auden

#3. That God is in truth the sort of bloodthirsty paranoid Who would rend to bits forty-two children for the crime of sassing one of his priests. Don't ask me about the Front Office's policies; I just work here.

Robert A. Heinlein

#4. From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.

Thomas Jefferson

#5. Blurbs don't work anymore!" was another. "You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters!" seemed at best debatable.

Scott Westerfeld

#6. I'd like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year?

Steve Jobs

#7. Tiny slices, no frosting, forty-five minutes on the StairMaster: These are the conditions, variations on a theme of vigilance and self-restraint that I've watched women dance to all my life, that I've danced to myself instinctively and still have to work to resist.

Caroline Knapp

#8. I was very much on the mathematical side, where you probably do your best work before you're forty-five. Having passed that significant date, I thought I would do something else.

John Polkinghorne

#9. Our late Leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with his universal sympathy for all oppressed and his profound understanding of Jesus' revolutionary spirit of love and sacrifice, carried on his revolutionary work for forty years and brought about at last the liberation of the Chinese people.

Chiang Kai-shek

#10. One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn't start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old.

Ellen Gilchrist

#11. I work in a giant building:
forty floors and forty cubicles
per wing, four wings per floor,
one person and one personal
computer per cubicle, a labyrinth
in which everyone's goal is to stay lost.

John Engman

#12. At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person's job.

Michael Crichton

#13. So," said Ruth, "how bad is it?" "You haven't read it?" "Not all of it." "Well," I said, politely, "it needs some work." "How much?" The words "Hiroshima" and "nineteen forty-five" floated briefly into my mind. "It's fixable," I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually.

Robert Harris

#14. It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes
until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,
critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove
him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works
of genius?

James N. Frey

#15. No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended.

Adrian Forty

#16. If you are a manager, it's your responsibility to keep the work part lively and full; it's not a key component of your job to ensure that employees consistently have a forty-hour workweek.

Eric Schmidt

#17. Today, at twenty-five, Travis is the manager of two Starbucks where he oversees forty employees and is responsible for revenues exceeding $2 million per year. His salary is $44,000 and he has a 401(k) and no debt. He's never late to work.

Charles Duhigg

#18. In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

Mary Oliver

#19. Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more so, an afternoon and evening worker.

G. Stanley Hall

#20. Don't be a salary slave! If you are going to do anything in this world, you must start before you are forty, before your period of initiative has ended. Do it now!

Robert Cochrane

#21. Many people over forty have at least one health condition that affects their ability to work a forty hour work week effectively. Human Resources (HR), doctors and governments have known this fact for decades.

Steven Magee

#22. Please," said Lirael ... "I think I would like to work in this Library."
"The Library," repeated Sanar, looking troubled. "That can be dangerous to a girl of fourteen. Or a woman of forty, for that matter.

Garth Nix

#23. I read a recent statistic that eighty-seven percent of women are dissatisfied with themselves, and over forty-seven percent of men. My work is visu-medicine to heal people and see beauty within people.

Jamel Shabazz

#24. I motivate what I see in young people because we employ about forty thousand young people in our various Chick-fil-A units. Some of them come to work because they need to work; others just work because they just like to work. There's nothing wrong with that.

S. Truett Cathy

#25. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of the mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten.

Marilynne Robinson

#26. You make your own kinds of mistakes, and I'm sure you'll have your share of regrets in life. But commitment was never your problem, sweetie. You have a better chance of making this work than most forty-year-olds I know. My little middle-aged child. Luckily, you seem to have found another old soul.

Stephenie Meyer

#27. Maybe it takes forty years of your life to understand how the world seems to work.

Chuck Klosterman

#28. Why can't people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?" said Arthur. Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh. "Forty-two!" he said with a malicious grin. "No, doesn't work. Never mind.

Douglas Adams

#29. Fifty is the new forty. I always thought my best work would come in the years forty to sixty, if I was fortunate enough to hang around - and it is hard to stick around.

Bruce Willis

#30. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#31. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

Dinaw Mengestu

#32. I did a lot of good work for the rest of the forty years ... science is an incremental thing. Everything builds on everything else, it's a pattern, it's a mosaic.

Gustav Nossal