Best Thankless Quotes & Sayings

Never try to convey your idea to the audience - it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it. — Andrei Tarkovsky

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! — William Shakespeare

Being a parent is dirty and scary and beautiful and hard and miraculous and exhausting and thankless and joyful and frustrating all at once. It's everything. (Confessions of a Scary Mommy, Gallery Books 2012). — Jill Smokler

A man accepts the thankless burden of responsibility. We women do not. To us, life is a game we play one day at a time. — Clive Cussler

[Eddie] wondered if every criminal saw himself as the hero of his own story and if every thankless son was convinced he'd been mistreated by his father. — Alice Hoffman

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever. — George Orwell

Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless. Christmas dinner's dark and blue. When you stop and try to see it From the turkey's point of view.
Sunday dinner isn't sunny. Easter feasts are just bad luck. When you see it from the viewpoint of a chicken or a duck. Oh how I once loved tuna salad Pork and lobsters, lamb chops too Till I stopped and looked at dinner From the dinner's point of view. — Shel Silverstein

I am going to St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job-it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor. — Al Capone

I would have thought that your being sent by the wisest men in your country, supposedly, to fight a nearly endless, thankless, horrifying, and, finally, pointless war, would have given you sufficient insight into the nature of humanity to last you throughout all eternity! — Kurt Vonnegut

Meddling with another man's folly is always thankless work. — Rudyard Kipling

Monotonous and thankless as her job can be sometimes, she cheers at the thought of her coworkers - a dozen of them crammed into their little offices in the basement - all cleverly disguised as harmless geeks, all capable of saving the world if called upon. — Alexis M. Smith

My other chore is to buy a tree- a thankless task. The only truly well-proportioned Christmas trees are the ones they use in advertisements. If you try and find one in real life you face inevitable disapointment. Your tree will lean to the left or the right. It will be too bushy at the base, or straggly at the top. Even if you do, by some miracle, find a perfect tree, if won't fit in the car and by the time you strap it to the rooftop and drive it home the branches are broken and twisted out of shape. You
wrestle it through the door, gagling on pine needles and sweating profusely, only to hear the maddening question from countless Christmases past: 'Is that really the best one you could find? — Michael Robotham

I started volunteering at an animal shelter, and little by little, my life started getting better. I think that is the secret. It is just being on a mission that is something bigger than me and it's thankless. You do that because it is thankless, and I am not looking for anybody to say, 'Thanks' and 'You are great!' — William McNamara

If you can make a little painting for the ears with a few words, well, I like words: I like cutting them up and finding different ways of saying the same thing. I get into a spell, and it all comes easy. I don't labor over it. I go inside the song. I think you make yourself an antenna for songs, and songs want to be around you. And then they bring other songs along, and then they're all sittin' around, and they're drinking your beer, and they're sleeping on the floor. And they are using the phone. They're rude, thankless little f-ers. — Tom Waits

Economic controversy is generally a thankless task. You cannot hope to make any impression on your opponent. Yet he is the only reader on whose interest you can count. — Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

I happened to notice that among the men who had willingly presented themselves for jury-service was one whom I knew to be the father of seven children. Under a law of Augustus's he was exempt for the rest of his life; yet he had not pleaded for exemption or mentioned the size of his family. I told the magistrate: "Strike this man's name off. He's a father of seven." He protested: "But, Caesar, he has made no attempt to excuse himself." "Exactly," I said, "he wants to be a juryman. Strike him off." I meant, of course,that the fellow was concealing his immunity from what every honest man considered a very thankless and disagreeable duty and that he therefore was almost certain to have crooked intentions. Crooked jurymen could pick up a lot of money by bribes, for it was a commonplace that one interested juryman could sway the opinions of a whole bunch of uninterested ones; and the majority verdict decided a case. — Robert Graves

Governance is complex, difficult, and on the whole, thankless - why ever should the Bright Young Things leave the management of their hotels, newspapers, banks, TV channels and corporations to join, like fleas on a behemoth, the government? Wherein lies the difference between the two worlds? — Upamanyu Chatterjee

A nurse and a social worker took fifteen minutes out of their shitty thankless job in the roughest corner of town, sat on a couple of milk crates drinking coffee, flopped their real selves out of the cement and both liked what they saw. — Laura Buzo

Scarlett O'Hara is going to be a thankless and difficult role. The part I'd like to play is Rhett Butler. — Norma Shearer

It's not always thankless. Let's face it - it's not always thankless. I've gotten a lot of really great recognition and I've worked with amazing people. — Kyra Sedgwick

Don't get me wrong. Being a mom is no picnic. Raising the kids is the mother's
responsibility. It's a thankless, solitary job, like sheriff or Pope. — Stephen Colbert

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence. — Emile M. Cioran

When I did 'The Social Network', David Fincher told me that I managed to make a thankless character pretty awesome. I thought that was really cool because I think he's really cool. — Dakota Johnson

Raising kids may be a thankless job with ridiculous hours, but at least the pay sucks. — Jim Gaffigan

Producing is a thankless task akin to hotel management. Unfortunately, there are not too many good hotel managers. — David Hemmings

Politics is a thankless occupation; I have no interest in it at all. — Ben Stein

Love doesn't save, it raises you up and makes you bigger, it lights you up from inside and carves out that light like wood in the forest. It nestles in the hollows of empty days, of thankless tasks, of useless hours, it doesn't drift along on golden rafts or sparkling rivers, it doesn't sing or shine and it never proclaims a thing. But at night, once the room's been swept and the embers covered over and the children are asleep
at night between the sheets, with slow gazes, not moving or speaking
at night, at last, when we're weary of our meager lives and the trivialities of our insignificant existance, each of us becomes the well where the other one can draw water ... — Muriel Barbery

The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad - a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros, — Ayn Rand

Sounds like a thankless job.
Sometimes the most important ones are. — Regina Jennings

Ah, how unjust to Nature and himself Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man! — Edward Young

My foray into the world of adults had taught me that very few people are willing to tell you the truth. It is something reserved only for the people who loved you the most unconditionally, the ones who were willing to absorb the denial and resentment that often accompanied it. It is a thankless job, that of the truth-teller. — Tina L. Hook

It's not so much a thankless task, it's more a job with no thanks — Colin Baker

Alan," cried I, "what makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow?"
Deed, and I don't, know" said Alan. "For just precisely what I thought I liked about ye, was that ye never quarrelled: - and now I like ye better! — Robert Louis Stevenson

9/11/01
Gina:
Especially today, with the enormity of current events, I want to convey to you again, how much you mean to me and how proud I am to be your husband. The hard work that you are engaged in right now is exhausting, invisible and largely thankless in the short term.
But honey, please know that buried at the core of this tedium is the most noble and important work in the world- God's work; the fruits of which you and I will be lucky enough to enjoy as we grow old together. Watching these little guys grow into men is a privilege that I am proud to share with you, and the perfect fulfillment of our marriage bonds.
You are a great mom.
You are a great wife.
You are my best friend.
You are very pretty.
Happy Birthday.

-Matt — Michael Spehn

The world is truly a terrible place. Every one of my generation is lost, filling the holes which are their lives with seditious and yet passionless acts of unnecessary drama. It is a world of hypocrisy and whispers, a dark mine shaft of overfed, spoiled, and thankless slaves too stupid to realize that, despite their steady stream of shallow luxuries, they are still slaves. — Jason S. Hornsby

There is no better feeling than doing well while you are doing good. If you really want to meet the nicest, most caring people in your field, get involved with charity work. The thankless hours that go into planning charity dinners, running a carnival, and gathering donations for silent auctions are noticed and appreciated. — Jay Samit