Office Wall Quotes & Sayings

In my office in Jerusalem, there's an ancient seal. It's a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there's a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu. — Benjamin Netanyahu

For 'Never Knowing,' I outlined it and then blocked it out on my office wall with index cards, but things still happened organically. — Chevy Stevens

What I could see of the apartment looked much like the office: gold high-low carpeting, Early American furniture, probably from Montgomery Ward. A painting of Jesus hung on the wall at the foot of the bed. He had his palms open, eyes lifted towards heaven- pained no doubt, by Ori's home decorating taste. — Sue Grafton

On his office wall he had a note to himself: 'Money is necessary
but it isn't too important.' Money meant for him to keep on writing and to go his own way. — Walter Farley

I don't have my diploma from the University of Nebraska hanging on my office wall, and I don't have my diploma from Columbia up there either-but I do have my Dale Carnegie graduation certificate proudly displayed. — Warren Buffett

Say that the berries on a tree fermented / say that some birds ate them got drunk demented / couldn't fly straight flew straight into instead / wall of an office block and fell down dead / down on the pavement people undeterred / stepping over the mound of broken bird — Ali Smith

The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.
For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol. — Alain De Botton

After that, she went silent again. It was a strained silence. I glanced at the calendar on the wall. Her period was not due yet. I imagined that something unpleasant might have happened at the office. — Haruki Murakami

So when Angua strode into the main office, slamming the big doors back, and there was a derisory wolf-whistle, the unwise watchman found himself being pushed backwards until he was slammed against the wall. He felt two sharp points pressed against his neck as Angua growled, "You want a wolf, do you? Say 'No, Sergeant Angua.'" "No, Sergeant Angua!" "You don't? I was probably mistaken then, was I?" The points pressed a little harder. In the man's mind, steely talons were about to pierce his jugular. "Couldn't say for sure, Sergeant Angua!" "My nerves are a tad stretched right now!" Angua howled. "Hadn't noticed, Sergeant Angua!" "We're all a little bit on edge at the moment, wouldn't you say!" "That's ever so true, Sergeant Angua!" Angua let the man's boot reach the ground. She put two black, shiny, and noticeably pointed heels into his unresisting hands. — Terry Pratchett

We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. "Take it down, darling," she once pleaded. But it still hangs there. — Mordecai Richler

My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous. — Paula Hawkins

Of course I don't believe in it [pointing to horseshoe on his office wall]. But I understand that it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not. — Niels Bohr

Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference." Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. — Kurt Vonnegut

I'll leave you with one that I have hanging on my office wall, compliments of Nike: Impossible is nothing. — Muhammad Ali

The ethos on Wall Street has not changed, and that's not going to come from the corner office. That's going to come, for better or worse, from Washington, and the whole idea of greed is still good, that is still pervasive. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

I have a little office in my house and it is an absolute pigsty but I know exactly where everything is and there are little things stuck all over the walls, and papers in in-trays and files I have saved on my computer and playlists I have made on my iTunes - things that take me to a place that I think is appropriate, — Tom Hiddleston

Mr. Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead wall. — Charles Dickens

Hewlett Packard at one point had only three private offices. One belonged to Hewlett, one to Packard, and the third to a guy named Paul Ely who annoyed so many coworkers with his bellowing on the phone that the company finally extended his cubicle walls to the ceiling. — Robert X. Cringely

Wall Street's outsized influence in our nation's capital is something I've talked about for a long time - long before I even thought about running for office. But where I see a problem - an infestation, really - a lot of others in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans, seem to see government working just fine. — Elizabeth Warren

Ask one question: Would a Millennial (anyone born between 1980 and 2000) look forward to working here?

Try this exercise. Take a group of people into a large, open room with tackable wall surfaces or whiteboards. Give them large sheets of paper, sticky notes, markers, and tape. Ask them to create a concept for a work environment (don't say "office") using the following words: high-energy, collaborative, healthy, productive, engaging, innovative, interactive, high-tech, and regenerating. — Rex Miller Sr.

Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. — Hannah Arendt

These lines of D.H. Lawrence are taped to the wall of my office:

"What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them."

I under[stand] that failure is surely one of these strange angels. — Anne Lamott

The door to Jakes' office slammed against the wall, and Vivi barreled through the opening. "Turn this ship around right now. — Cheryl Sterling

Anyway, time is more than counting days. On the outside, people think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says six a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning. I better get up for work or It's time to feed the baby. Or That was the year I got cancer or That is the day we celebrate your birthday. Or Remember when our father died or Let's remember to plant turnips this spring. It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe. — Rene Denfeld

After three hours, I come back to the waiting room. It is a cosmetic surgery office, so a little like a hotel lobby, underheated and expensively decorated, with candy in little dishes, emerald-green plush chairs, and upscale fashion magazines artfully displayed against the wall.
A young woman comes in, frantic to get a pimple "zapped" before she sees her family over the holidays. An older woman comes in with her daughter for a follow-up visit to a face-lift. She is wearing a scarf and dark glasses. The nurse examines her bruises right out in the waiting room.
And you are in the operating room having your body and your gender legally altered. I feel like laughing, but I know it makes me sound like a lunatic. — Joan Nestle

I personally keep slave documents listing the value of slaves framed on my wall in California, and in my office in Chicago. — Sue Monk Kidd

I have on my office wall a wise and useful reminder by Anne Morrow Lindbergh concerning one of the realities of life. She wrote, "My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds." That's good counsel for us all, not as an excuse to forgo duty, but as a sage point about pace and the need for quality in relationships. — Neal A. Maxwell

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. — William Shakespeare

Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts!" — P. J. O'Rourke

The truth is not that the problem is the newsroom does not understand capitalism. The problem is that the front office does not understand journalism. The problem is not that the average reporter does not understand what it is that's necessary to make the payroll, to make the good edifice, to make the thing that he wants. It is that in fact those who control too many of the edifices have actually come to believe that Wall Street has wisdom, and that that wisdom should instruct our business. — Hodding Carter III

She blushed and we went into a small lab that looked not unlike a doctor's office and smelled of naphtha. A black Formica counter ran along one wall with a shelf of little bottles above it and three light trays. A single steel sink was sunk into the counter, with a binocular microscope on one side of it and a large magnifying glass on a gooseneck stand on the other. Modern crime fighting at its cutting-edge finest. — Robert Crais

But having biologists outside the Beltway remained a problem for the adminisration. "They found they couldn't control us," Williams said ... "That sort of thing just drove them up the wall. They were so used to saying 'do this,' and we'll just go away and do it. Never ask questions. The biologists had good connections with the press and national environmental group. "So eventually they said, 'Okay we're going to send you guys out to the hinterlands.'" The Regan administration began to dismantle the Endangered Species Office in D.C. Biologists have been working from regional offices ever since. — Joe Roman

He let himself into the security office and scanned the wall of surveillance monitors. Parking lot clear. Corridors empty. Cafeteria empty. Heart empty. — Kerrelyn Sparks

So I walked down to the operation nearest my office, a brothel, and found the manager. Before he could say anything, I pinned the right side of his cloak to the wall with a throwing knife, about knee level. I did the same with his left side. I put a shuriken into the wall next to each ear, close enough to cut. Then Loiosh went after him and raked his claws down the guy's face. I went up and hit him just below his sternum, then kneed him in the face when he doubled over. He began to understand that I wasn't happy. — Steven Brust

I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat-cat bankers on Wall Street. — Barack Obama

Stories of Fantasy are nothing more than the retelling of our own triumphs and sad, sad tragedies ... Tod Langley
I have that painted on my office wall and love to stare at it. — Tod Langley

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted. — Tina Brown

Possibly I am difficult to live with, but I don't bring my work home much. I'm either busy or not busy. And I don't work from home. I have an office here which has a white wall. No view. I did try working in a room with a view but it was too interesting. Too distracting. — Jack Dee

Machismo requires Latin blood. I'd say I never experienced machismo up close until I worked in a French office; the typical Wall Street gunner has the soul of a coffee filter in comparison. — Rosecrans Baldwin

Entering yet another code, she took the passageway to Rehv's office, and when she came through his door, the three males around the desk all looked at her warily.
She took up res against the black wall across from them. "What."
Rehv leaned back in his chair, crossing his fur-clad arms over his chest. "Are you getting ready to go into your needing."
As he spoke, Trez and iAm both made the Shadow hand motion for warding off disaster.
"God, no. Why do you ask?"
"Because, no offense, you're cranky as fuck."
"I am not."
As the males looked at one another, she barked, "Stop that."
Oh, great, now they all just pointedly didn't look at each other.

-Xhex, Rehv, Trez & iAm — J.R. Ward

Everything he's learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet. — Charles Stross

Elane scan the room and takeing in the white antiseptec decor of Buzzfeed office in Soho. Her eyes land on a wall decoratien, a glareing yellow butten about the size of a parasol. It read simply: LOL. It seem to mock her. Honestly? Elane just dosent fit in here. No one here is under 30 and to Elane it is almost like nobody speaking Englesh. Everything is "HTML 5" this and "Keven Ware sports injery" that and "Game Of Throans recap" this and "Downten Abby parady tumblr" that. She have no idea what any of that mean. She open her face book and feal deep pit of emptynes as she click thru the profiles of her 17 face book frends. — Seinfeld 2000

Smoking cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall, teacher sends you to the Principal's office down the hall. — Stevie Wonder

Instead of scaring him, that threat set fire to his temper. No one threatened Nick Gautier.
"I'm not afraid of you. You want to fight ... bring it."
Something struck the wall by his face. Hard. It was so close to him that whatever it was grazed his nose.
In spite of his bravado, that actually scared him blind. Hard to fight something when you couldn't see it ... Jack-rabbiting up the stairs, he went into Kyrian's training room instead of his office.
Nick slammed the door and threw himself against it, arms wide to keep it shut. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The ... office was decorated in early American Earth Mother, with spider plants, hemp wall tapestries, and beeswax candles. — Karen Neches

His exhaustion is that of the gladiator after the combat; his labor was the whitewashing of a corner of the wall in his office. — Kafka, Franz

It's often been said, "Violence never solved anything." The simple truth is that when you are slammed up against the wall and the knife is at your throat, when a circle of teenagers is kicking you as you curl into a ball on the sidewalk, or when the man walks into your office building or school with a pair of guns and starts shooting, only violence, or the reasonable threat of violence, is going to save your life. In the extreme moment, only force can stop force. — Rory Miller

I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world, I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fluffy kitties; she was the most bigoted, spiteful champion of the death penalty with whom it has ever been my misfortune to share a kettle.
A love of all things saccharine often seems present where there is a lack of real warmth or charity. — J.K. Rowling

I'm trying to sum up President Obama's first 11 months in office. He gave billions to Wall Street, cracked down on illegal immigrants getting health care, and he's sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. You know something, he may go down in history as our greatest Republican president ever. — Jay Leno

When I photographed Marilyn Monroe, I mixed up my cameras - one had black-and-white film, the other color. I took many pictures. Only two color ones came out all right. My favorite picture of Marilyn hangs always on the wall in my office. It was taken on the little patio of her Hollywood house. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

I picked up a mug with the complicated name of a medication stamped across the side, and a slogan about Treating Today for Tomorrow. They're handed out to places like this by visiting drug companies. Last time I went in the office to borrow the Nursing Dictionary, I counted three mugs, a mouse mat, a bunch of pens, two Post-it note booklets and the wall clock - all sporting the brands of different medicines. It's like being in prison and having to look at adverts for fucking locks. — Nathan Filer

I come from a law enforcement family. My grandfather, William J. Comey, was a police officer. Pop Comey is one of my heroes. I have a picture of him on my wall in my office at the FBI, reminding me of the legacy I've inherited and that I must honor. — James Comey

A person's looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we've been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That's the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall. — Tom Robbins

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few. — Debbie Macomber

Flying has always been to me this wonderful metaphor. In order to fly you have to trust what you can't see. Up on the mountain ridges where very few people have been I have thought back to what every flyer knows. That there is this special world in which we dwell that's not marked by boundaries, it's not a map. We're not hedged about with walls and desks. So often in an office the very worst thing that can happen is you could drop your pencil. Out there's a reminder that are a lot worse things, and a lot greater rewards. — Richard Bach

Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun. — Heather Grace Stewart

On the wall of Amshad's office there was a poster that made me laugh: DO NOT GIVE ME A BANGLE, GIVE ME A PEN. Well-meaning charities often train illiterate slum women to make cheap trinkets. — Edward Luce

I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into
managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a
manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often
neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go
after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that
producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.
Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get
muscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the most
ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street - why
Salomon Brothers is getting crunched now - because the ruthless people
are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure. — Michael Lewis

I'm not too easily distracted now I've had practice, but I write with nothing to look at. I used to rent an office that just had a view of a wall! — Jane Goldman

I stayed against the back wall, as far away as I could get. Not just to stay away from the Plague Lady but to be farther away from the weird old dolls that lined the shelves of her office. Real-looking hair sprouted from their crumbling heads and all their faces were painted with smiles. Kids in the old days must have loved nightmares or something. — Scott Westerfeld

Before Dwayne entered his inner office, he read one of many comical signs which Francine had put up on the wall in order to amuse people, to remind them of what they so easily forgot: that people didn't have to be serious all the time. — Kurt Vonnegut

You still excite me after all this time, probably even more so now than in the beginning." My voice is a low threatening growl as the fingers on my free hand slide her panties over to reveal what I already know to be true; she is wet. "I love the way your body responds to me." I pull her from the wall and lead her to the fainting couch adorning the sitting area in my office. Brushing her hair back from her ear, I lean in and whisper, "Turn around, bend over, and put your hands on the end of the couch. I don't care what I do to you, those hands better not fucking move out of position. — Suzanne Steele

Becoming a dad means you get transformed from the healthy, vibrant, intelligent, youthful person pictured in your wedding photo into a twitching, bewildered, sleep-deprived, Play-Dough-smeared creature who looks like the guy in the photo on the post office wall, only less chipper. — David Meurer

Videographer stopped taping and looked me up and down as if he found me lacking but wasn't quite sure how. Then it hit him. "Don't you have a gun?" He glanced around the office as if there might be one hanging on a wall hook. — Robert Crais

Free folk don't follow names, or little cloth animals sewn on a tunic," the King-Beyond-the-Wall had told him. "They won't dance for coins, they don't care how your style yourself or what that chain of office means or who your grandsire was. They follow strength. They follow the man. — George R R Martin

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don't think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths. — Jimmy Carter