Quotes & Sayings About Rat Race

there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. — Alan W. Watts

She looked up at me, her face mostly revealed now, and she smiled just the littlest bit.
'It amazes me that you can find all that shit even remotely interesting.'
'Huh?'
'College: getting in or not getting in. Trouble: getting in or not getting in. School: getting A's or getting D's. Career: having or not having. House: big or small, owning or renting. Money: having or not having. It's all so boring. — John Green

A fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy - but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits — Neal Stephenson

I talk about freedom from the Rat Race, and they focus on toilets. That is the thought pattern that keeps most people poor. They criticize instead of analyze. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

Children need time to become themselves--through play and social interaction. If you overwhelm a child with stuff--with choices and pseudochoices--before they are ready, they will only know one emotional gesture: More! — Kim John Payne

Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature ... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book. — R.D. Laing

The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents. — Margaret Halsey

I would be a winner because I was a loser! That's right. I dream of failure every night of my life, and that's my secret. To makeit in this rat race you have to dream of failing every day. I mean, that is reality. — Donald Freed

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered
sometimes it seemed to take forever
went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down. — Bernard Malamud

I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric! — John Cleese

People sometimes forget that a rat race can be won only by a rat. — Paul Palmer

Financial Freedom is less about Financials and more about FREEDOM — Manoj Arora

I wouldn't mind the rat race - if the rats would lose once in a while. — Tom Wilson

A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. — Jimmy Reid

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes. — H.L. Mencken

Seventy-five years. That's how much time you get if you're lucky. Seventy-five years. Seventy-five winters, seventy-five springtimes, seventy-five summers, and seventy-five autumns. When you look at it like that, it's not a lot of time, is it? Don't waste them. Get your head out of the rat race and forget about the superficial things that pre-occupy your existence and get back to what's important now. — Eddie Murphy

To enter the corporate rat race, you need to become a rat. — Lakshmy Menon Chatterjee

What about the rat race in the first place? Is it worthwhile? Or are you just buying into someone else's definition of success? Only you can decide that, and you'll have to decide it over and over and over. But if you think it's a rat race, before you drop out, take a deep breath. Maybe you picked the wrong job. Try again. And then try again. — Sheryl Sandberg

Our everyday cares, making a living, the crazy rat race of life, often make us forget the value of a good deed. Thus, the goodness that exists within each and every one of us is covered with layer upon layer of indifference and unawareness. In fact, we almost have to be reminded of the fact that goodness is there inside us. — Shari Arison

In this rat-race everybody's guilty till proved innocent! — Bette Davis

I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not. — Jean Webster

What happened yesterday was obviously a mistake, and it will never be spoken of again. Goodbye forever. — Faith Erin Hicks

A lot of people live with no apparent means of support. I kind of envy the musicians up there. You're down here, busting your ass in Hollywood, and it's like Lily Tomlin's joke about the rat race - all you prove in the end is that you're a rat. — Kurt Voss

You can beat me in the rat race, but remember u still remain a rat. — Reetwika Banerjee

My place, your place, slapped face, rat race. — Roger Daltrey

The arms race is worse than it ever was, the dumping of creation down a military rat hole is worse than it ever was, the wars across the earth are worse than they ever were. — Daniel Berrigan

A person who is in a constant rat race seldom has time to think whether or not he is living his life properly — Sunday Adelaja

I go down to New York, do the project, and leave. I have no interest in participating in the rat race down there. Hip jazz fans know who I am. There's a generation of musicians in New York who know my records better than I do. — Paul Smoker

Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' And I say I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York. — Alice Neel

I will not join the rat race because I'm not a rat. And I will not blindly follow a specific faith because I'm not a bat. The only race I'll take part in is for humans being humane. It's called the human race, and sadly it's got the least participants. — Suzy Kassem

We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary. — Peter Watts

My idea of an actor is to be different persons with different roles. Every time a script interests me, I look for interesting characters because I intend to completely transport myself into it. This happens only because I am a very greedy actor. I am not part of the rat race because I am living a dream. — Vidya Balan

Nobody loves the rat race, but nobody can think of anything else - Satan has us just where he wants us. — Hugh Nibley

Jiu Jitsu shielded me from all of this. While many were investing in jobs they did not like, or frequenting bars and spending their weekends in front of the television, I pursued something worthy of my choosing. I say this not to slander another, but to show the sincerity with which I appreciate Jiu Jitsu's influence in my life. It saved me from the rat race. I found a reason to eat healthy, to get to bed early. A reason to stay in Friday nights, resulting in fewer beers and more books. I found a medium with which to carve my soul. — Chris Matakas

Rat race is the perfect name for it,' she said. 'We're always going and going and going, and never asking where. Did you ever hear of having more than you wanted? So that you couldn't want anything else and then started looking for something else to want? It seems like we're always searching for something to satisfy is, and never finding it. Maybe if we could lose our cool we would. — S.E. Hinton

While one who sings with his tongue on fire Gargles in the rat race choir Bent out of shape from society's pliers Cares not to come up any higher But rather get you down in the hole That he's in. — Bob Dylan

I recommend to young people to seek work for what they will learn, more than what they will earn. Look down the road at what skills they want to acquire before choosing a specific profession and before getting trapped in the Rat Race. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race. — Aman Jassal

An unhurried mind brings the capacity to make wise choices every day - choices of how we use our time, of where we place our resources and our love. I am not just talking about avoiding the rat race, but about a life full of an artistic beauty - a life that has almost vanished from modern civilization, but is quite within the reach of everyone. — Eknath Easwaran

Societies need self sacrificing ignorant crowd;
Religions need fearful followers;
Systems need obedient slaves;
Corporate world needs compulsive consumers,
and
I NEED THE COURAGE TO RISE ABOVE THESE FOUR PARASITES. — Saurabh Sharma

Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot; things that are so completely alien ... that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction. — June Goodfield

Today's youth seem finally to have understood that only by freeing woman from her exclusively sexual role can man free himself from his ordained role in the rat-race: that of the rat. — Carolyn Heilbrun

Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is. — Neal Stephenson

We can leave the rat race to rodents... but I suspect that even they wouldn't like it — Adriano Bulla

I am very ambitious and have set goals for myself. I really don't keep a tab on what my contemporaries are doing. I want to push myself as an actress and don't want to get into the rat race. With every film, I want to grow as a person and an actress. The character I play needs to change me in real life. — Sonam Kapoor

It's a rare moment when we take a break from the tribulations of the daily rat race to reflect on assumptions and values that we casually accept as gospel. — Graydon Carter

It is one thing to decry the rat race ... that is the good and honorable work of moralists. It is quite another thing to quit the rat race, to drop out, to refuse to run any further
that is the work of the individualist. It is offensive because it is impolite it makes the rebuke personal the individualist calls not his or her behavior into question, but mine. — Paul Gruchow

It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat. — Richard Koch

Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it. — Abbie Hoffman

You are the part of rat race because you are letting them treat you like a rat. This is the modern definition of a slave. — Saurabh Sharma

We can't go from zero to sixty in a day or even a week when it comes to shifting our food-habit gears. We have to take baby steps, starting with an increasing awareness of our habits and a willingness to chip away at the ones that aren't doing us any good. Slowly, with time and commitment, we move away from the rat-race, multitasking mentality to a place where we want to give our meals and ourselves the time and attention we deserve. — Mary DeTurris Poust

TV is the rat race of the century. — Groucho Marx

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: If you win the rat race, you're still a rat. — Anna Quindlen

Well I've got to get out of the rat-race now I'm tired of the ways of mice and men And the empires all turning into rust again. Out of everything nothing remains the same That's why I'm cloud hidden Cloud hidden Whereabouts unknown. — Van Morrison

[Poem: Slates of Grey]
Sullen faces like slates of grey
What I'd seen on a walk today.
Bodies rushing bodies bolting
Time for life a disregarding.
Money to make and to grow old
What about the hands to hold?
Deadlines, projects, people to meet
What about our own two feet.
Sullen faces like slates of grey ...
What I'd see most anyday. — Jess C. Scott

The human spirit and self-esteem are compromised when you lay down your arms to the pressures of society in a rat race. — Mayank Sharma

I didn't miss the rat race, but I kinda missed the rats. — Jerry Nachman

Jesus doesn't participate in the rat race. He's into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling - all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace. Words used to describe us being with Him. — Lysa TerKeurst

People say life is short, is it really?
actually life is short if you take it as competition or race then you never find a second for yourself but If you take life as joy as celebration then life is more than enough suddenly you start watching bliss everywhere ... but if you are busy in rat race then you don't even attain peace or happiness in your whole life .. be still nd enjoy this very moment then life is a journey which never ends .. — Jagvir

A study of the San Francisco Beat enclave by psychiatrist Dr. Francis Rigney in the late 1950's showed 60 percent "were so psychotic or crippled by tensions, anxiety and neurosis as to be nonfunctional in the competitive world." In contrast, the several studies released so far made of the student radicals at Berkeley show them to be stable, serious, and of above-average intelligence. The point is that the Beats had to "cop out" of the Rat Race because they couldn't perform; the New Left chooses to reject a society it could easily be successful in. — Jack Newfield

Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.
Join the Rat Race "just for a while."
Concentrate on your career "just for a while."
Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."
Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."
Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while. — Christopher Brookmyre

Most people have a price. And they have a price because of human emotions named fear and greed. First, the fear of being without money motivates us to work hard, and then once we get that paycheck, greed or desire starts us thinking about all the wonderful things money can buy. A pattern is then set: get up, go to work, pay bills, get up, go to work, pay bills ... Their lives are then run forever by two emotions, fear and greed. Offer them more money, and they continue the cycle by also increasing their spending. This is what I call the Rat Race. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final. — Hunter S. Thompson

Just because it's a rat race doesn't mean it's okay to be a rat. — Linda Ellerbee

Schools are not exam factories for the rat race. — Johann Lamont

In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, ... it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial. — Paul Goodman

Disengaging from the rat race Jackson — Kate Atkinson

If you want to breed something, breed bravehearts, not soulless racehorses. — Abhijit Naskar

A bus drives past and I'm nauseated by a whiff of exhaust. Then rotting fish. The rancid stench of sewage. Is it garbage day? I'm trapped in the pungent fog, in the dreary suburban-style shops, the rat race of city life. The city, even on the west coast, has the power to beat us down, to suck us of passion, to crush our dreams. — Shannon Mullen

Life without knowing your destiny leads to "rat races", depression and frustration, and attempt to commit suicide — Sunday Adelaja

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. — Jimmy Reid

The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. — Ivan Illich

In the abundance of water a fool is thirsty.
Rat Race, from the album Rastaman Vibration
When one door is closed, many more is open.
Coming in from the Cold, from the album Confrontation
It is better to live on the house top
than to live in a house full of confusion. — Bob Marley

It's hopeless, trying to recruit a stranger to help me find someone who's a stranger to him. But then again, we are all strangers to ourselves, caught up in the monotony of daily life, stuck in our routines, never really stopping to think about what will happen to us if we fall off track. — Shannon Mullen

Our modern day, hyper-rat-race culture often leads us to mistakenly confuse
'busy' for 'success'. The truth of the matter is that if you're constantly having to tell people how busy you are and how overwhelmed with work or stressed you are, what you're really telling them is that you can't cope with what's on your plate. You're 'failing'. — Oli Anderson

Leaving the rat race is easy. All you have to do is quit your job, sell your house, and go and live in a tent in the middle of nowhere. It's staying out of the rat race that's tricky. — Fennel Hudson

To win the rat race, you have to think and behave like a cat. — Manoj Vaz

Is anyone anywhere happy? No, not unless they are living in a dream or in an artifice that they or someone else has made. For a time I was lulled in the arms of a blind organism with breasts full of champagne and nipples made of caviar. I thought she was true, and that the true was the beautiful. But the true is the ugly mixed up everywhere, like a peck of dirt scattered through your life. The true is that there is no security, no artifice to stop the unsavory changes, the rat race, the death unwish - the winged chariot, the horns and the motors, the Devil in the clock. Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods, but a rather pedestrian pair of muddled suburbanites who, no matter how bumbling they tried, never could quite understand how or why you grew up to your 21st birthday. — Sylvia Plath

I don't run for trains." Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Everybody in America is so money-hungry. It's like a rat race and even when you win you're still a freaking rat. — Mike Tyson

One who sings with his tongue on fire, gargles in the rat race choir. — Bob Dylan

You can win the rat race but you're still a rat.

The human race is an unfair and stupid competition. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water.

Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side.

It's not surprising a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk food and shout abuse.

What we need in this race is a lot more streakers. — Banksy

Can't be part of the rat race when you're one of the rats who knows you're in a cage. — Ed Brubaker

If you join the rat race - you're in the race of rats. — Bertolt Brecht

They said, congratulations you got what it takes. They sent him back to the rat race without any brakes. — Bob Dylan

Nature shows me incredible beauty standing just beyond the rat race. It's always there if I'm open enough to see it. — Dewitt Jones

In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. — Walter Brueggemann

Windows were shakin' all night in my dreams/ Everything was exactly the way that it seems/ Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page/ Same ol' rat race/ Life in the same ol' cage. — Bob Dylan

Some people that are in charge are usually less intelligent than the people who work under them. The reason why those people are in charge and you aren't is because you have a conscience. — Heather Chapple

In the '80s, I got tired of the rat race. It was a terrible time for music. I wasn't part of that whole MTV craze. I did 'Go Ahead and Rain,' which was Madeleine Stowe's first bit, but felt no connection to it. I went many years where I didn't have to work. — J. D. Souther

Read History: thus learn how small a space
You may inhabit, nor inhabit long
In crowding Cosmos
in that confined place
Work boldly; build your flimsy barriers strong;
Turn round and round, make warm your nest; among
The other hunting beasts, keep heart and face,
Not to betray the doomed and splendid race
You are so proud of, to which you belong.
For trouble comes to all of us: the rat
Has courage, in adversity, to fight;
But what a shining animal is man,
Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that,
For worse than that must follow
yet can write
Music; can laugh; play tennis; even plan. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

It's not about being a sex prostitute. It's about this power play in the war of the sexes. It's a rat race, like, "I'm in charge," "No, I'm in charge." — Lykke Li

Life had become some kind of profound competition, where my emotional loss was substituted by my professional success. I became a part of what they call the rat race. — Saurbh Katyal

Retirement: It's nice to get out of the rat race, but you have to learn to get along with less cheese. — Gene Perret

The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. — Lily Tomlin