87 Quotes about Jobs and Life to Motivate You

You found our list of the best quotes about jobs and life.

Quotes about jobs and life are famous phrases that pertain to choosing a career and finding meaning in work. For example, "Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." - Aristotle or "Energy and persistence conquer all things." - Benjamin Franklin. The purpose of these sentiments is to help professionals find a fitting field and discover the motivation to work.

These phrases are similar to quotes about hard work, remote work quotes, and quotes about success. You can use these phrases along with career quizzes to find your dream job.

This list includes:

• quotes about career choices
• inspirational quotes for job interviews
• motivational quotes for job seekers
• new beginning quotes for jobs
• funny career quotes
• quotes about change at work

Here we go!

Quotes about career choices

1. "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it." - Steve Jobs
2. "Desire! That's the one secret of every man's career. Not education. Not being born with hidden talents. Desire." - Bobby Unser
3. "Work to become, not to acquire." - Elbert Hubbard
4. "Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it." - Katherine Whitehorn
5. "There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions – in a way that serves the world and you." - Richard Branson
6. "You can quit your job, but you can't quit your calling." - Lissa Rankin
7. "Don't confuse having a career with having a life." - Hillary Clinton
8. "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
9. "Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs." - Farrah Gray
10. "Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." - Aristotle
11. "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.
12. "You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it." - Oprah Winfrey
13. "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

Inspirational quotes for job interviews

1. "A career is a series of ups and downs, of comebacks." - Steve Guttenberg
2. "A career is born in public - talent in privacy." - Marilyn Monroe
3. "The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Abraham Lincoln
4. "You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do." - Confucius
5. "Be so good they can't ignore you." - Steve Martin
6. "Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will." - Suzy Kassem
7. "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
8. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." - Wayne Gretzky
9. "I want to look back on my career and be proud of the work, and be proud that I tried everything." - Jon Stewart
10. "No man ever listened himself out of a job." - Calvin Coolidge
11. "Take your job seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously." - Alex Trebek
12. "If you believe in yourself and have dedication and pride - and never quit, you'll be a winner. The price of victory is high but so are the rewards." - Bear Bryant
13. "Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it." - Bruce Lee
14. "Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it." - Diane Sawyer
15. "Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there." - John Wooden
16. "It's not what you achieve, it's what you overcome. That's what defines your career." - Carlton Fisk

Motivational quotes for job seekers

1. "If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." - Milton Berle
2. "I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination." - Jimmy Dean
3. "The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
4. "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." - Robert Louis Stevenson
5. "If I went by all the rejection I've had in my career, I should have given up a long time ago." - Mike Myers
6. "Rejection is a common occurrence. Learning that early and often will help you build up the tolerance and resistance to keep going and keep trying." - Kevin Feige
7. "When you're at the end of your rope, all you have to do is make one foot move out in front of the other. Just take the next step. That's all there is to it." - Samuel Fuller
8. "A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success." - Bo Bennett
9. "You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great." - Zig Ziglar
10. "You need to believe in yourself and what you do. Be tenacious and genuine." - Christian Louboutin
11. "Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it." - Chuck Palahniuk
12. "Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in." - Bill Bradley
13. "Energy and persistence conquer all things." - Benjamin Franklin

New beginning quotes for jobs

1. "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." - Andre Gide
2. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust
3. "With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts." - Eleanor Roosevelt
4. "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney
5. "Repetition doesn't create memories. New experiences do." - Brian Chesky
6. "Starting a new job can be nerve-racking , but it's also exciting. You're embarking on a new future, positioning yourself to write a fresh story on a clean slate." - Adena Friedman
7. "If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success." - John D. Rockefeller
8. "The sky is the limit. You never have the same experience twice." - Frank McCourt
9. "All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary." - Sally Ride
10. "When one door closes, another opens." - Alexander Graham Bell
11. "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
12. "Any transition is easier if you believe in yourself and your talent." - Priyanka Chopra

Funny career quotes

1. "Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups." - Cathy Guisewite
2. "The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one." - Oscar Wilde
3. "Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there." - Josh Billings
4. "A lot of people quit looking for work as soon as they find a job." - Zig Ziglar
5. "Getting fired is nature's way of telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place." - Hal Lancaster
6. "Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit." - George Carlin
7. "The harder I work, the luckier I get." - Samuel Goldwyn
8. "​​When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt." - Henry J. Kaiser
9. "If the career you have chosen has some unexpected inconvenience, console yourself by reflecting that no career is without them." - Jane Fonda
10. "You can’t have a million dollar dream with a minimum wage worth ethic." - Zig Ziglar
11. "If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn’t have a job if he was any smarter." - John Gotti
12. "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field." - Niels Bohr
13. "Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you’re just sitting still?" - J. Paul Getty
14. "What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day." - Phyllis Diller
15. "If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." - Red Adair
16. "Do your job and demand your compensation - but in that order." - Cary Grant

Quotes about change at work

1. "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." - John F. Kennedy
2. "Change is never easy, but always possible." - Barack Obama
3. "Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win." - Max McKeown
4. "Change before you have to." - Jack Welch
5. "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." - Steve Jobs
6. "The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday's logic." - Peter Drucker
7. "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." - Albert Einstein
8. "Change is the end result of all true learning." - Leo Buscaglia
9. "Leaders must be close enough to relate to others but far enough ahead to motivate them." - John C. Maxwell
10. "A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be." - Rosalynn Carter
11. "Every success story is a tale of constant adaptation, revision, and change." - Richard Branson
12. "Change brings opportunities. You have to trust that new paths will emerge." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
13. "Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are affected by it." - Bill Clinton
14. "Adaptability isn’t about compromising your values; it’s about staying resilient and learning." - Indra Nooyi
15. "Adaptability is about mastering change rather than merely surviving it." - Harold Geneen
16. "Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end." - Robin Sharma
17. "Growth and comfort do not coexist." - Ginni Rometty

Conclusion

Choosing a career, searching for jobs, or interviewing can seem like daunting tasks, and the wisdom and humor in these quotes about work and life can make the process easier. Work is one of the most significant parts of human life, and these sentiments can help guide folks towards fitting and fulfilling jobs. Applying for jobs is a marathon, and mentors or loved ones may not always be around to give much-needed pep-talks. These quotes can deliver a dose of motivation to help ambitious professionals keep working towards finding the ideal job.

For more wise words, check out this list of HR-approved quotes, these quotes on work-life balance, and this collection of President's Day quotes.