Surviving Work Quotes & Sayings

For me, my 20s were all about reaching for the brass ring of work in theater, television, and film, surviving in between by waiting tables, painting houses, serving coffee, and temping. — Kate Walsh

Being a musician is to live, not to survive. Surviving is going to work every day and giving up your liberty and your time. When you do music, it's a free life. — Richard Pinhas

Even though I had a fantastic family, I always felt lonely - not lonely in the melancholic way but knowing that, to really survive, I have to do everything for myself. I had to work and study, and I was out in the street really surviving, bringing food back home. — Riccardo Tisci

The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children's school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality ... — Lewis Mumford

Seizing God's vision means deciding that you will not spend another day surviving your work environment, family dynamic, or dysfunctional situation. — Steven Furtick

I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside, and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women's work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others. — Audre Lorde

Follow your passion was not the message I heard growing up. Instead, I was told that the practical realities of surviving "in the real world" were far more important than any person living a "sheltered life" such as my own could imagine. I was warned that overly idealistic dreams of "finding something I loved" could in fact be a breadcrumb trail into poverty and disappointment. — Angela Duckworth

There are obvious psychological stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation. Most higher primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are few examples of individuals surviving outside of a group. A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit situation that humans evolved for into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good, and people sleep alone or with a partner. Even if he or she is in a family, that is not the same as belonging to a large, self-sufficient group that shares and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society - and they're nearly miraculous - the individual lifestyles that those technologies spawn may be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit. — Jonathan Franzen

The tale of America coming out of the Great Depression and not only surviving but actually transforming itself into an economic giant is the stuff of legend. But the part that gives me goose bumps is what we did with all that wealth: over several generations, our country built the greatest middle class the world had ever known. We built it ourselves, using our own hard work and the tools of government to open up more opportunities for millions of people. We used it all - tax policy, investments in public education, new infrastructure, support for research, rules that protected consumers and investors, antitrust laws - to promote and expand our middle class. The spectacular, shoot-off-the-fireworks fact is that we succeeded. — Elizabeth Warren

It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really matters - and that's surviving. — Richard Branson

I am not concerned with simply surviving. I am very concerned about improving. I start each day by examining yesterday's work and looking for areas where I can improve. I am always trying to draw the characters better, and trying to design each panel somewhat in the manner a painter would treat his canvas. — Charles M. Schulz

Democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time. Most people's daily lives are just about surviving. Most people don't have time to really study [crucial] issues. — Brad Pitt

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that "when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped." For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for purposeless behavior - that is, for actions not directly aimed at survival, which fulfill themselves in being done in the present and do not necessarily imply some future reward. — Alan W. Watts

Each time I take a role, I'm always nervous about it at the beginning and I'm always afraid what if that, what if this. Every time I take a role and I'm somewhat terrified at the beginning and I get into it and I start working, that's a big win for me. So, really it is stepping forward in the face of whatever fears that I've created for myself and going forward anyway and those are always big moments for me. — Ryan Reynolds

After about five minutes had passed, I went outside and they'd gone. When I checked my hand to see if my knuckles were swelling or any bruising was coming up I got a shock, there was false tan on my knuckles! I still chuckle about that to this day. — Stephen Richards

I always thought I would die before the end. I trudged on knowing I was doomed. But my friends have breathed love into me, breathed my faith back into my bones. They've made me want to live. — Pierce Brown

There was more than one power at work, Frodo. The — J.R.R. Tolkien

Surviving war is an excellent training process. If it weren't so brutal, I 'd recommend it as an excellent start-up course in life. I feel that over years of endurance, hard work and perseverance of determination and conviction, of claiming our rights to stay alive, to be free and to be ourselves, of fighting the biggest wars as much as the smaller ones, our will can indeed move mountains for us. — Joumana Haddad

Sometimes Danielle fantasized about "waiting tables or working in some easy job where [she] didn't have to think or didn't make mistakes." But twentysomethings who hide out in underemployment, especially those who are hiding out because of a lack of confidence, are not serving themselves. For work success to lead to confidence, the job has to be challenging and it must require effort. It has to be done without too much help. And it cannot go well every single day. A long run of easy successes creates a sort of fragile confidence, the kind that is shattered when the first failure comes along. A more resilient confidence comes from succeeding - and from surviving some failures. — Meg Jay

Giving never moves in a straight line - it always moves in circles. — Robert H. Schuller

We need to reevaluate and reconsider what is appropriate human behavior. Human beings have been so successful at surviving because of our intelligence and cooperation. When we are unintelligent and uncooperative it is no wonder that our survival is threatened. We need to be educated about our health and the health of our planet, and work together to achieve goals that are impossible to achieve individually. — Joseph P. Kauffman

'The Creative Habit' is basically about how you work alone, how you survive as a solitary artist. 'The Collaborative Habit' is obviously about surviving with other people. — Twyla Tharp

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world. — Evelyn Waugh

The plague took too much, from all of us. But we're here. We survived, and we work hard all week, just trying to keep surviving. There are always chores to do, crops to tend, animals to care for, fences to build. Another task to complete if we want to stay alive. But the fact that we survived, that we're still here when billions aren't, is worth celebrating. So once a week, on Saturday night, we have a party. We gather in the north barn, we eat, we laugh, we play music, we dance, and we try and remember the joy in a world steeped in misery. — Robin Summers

This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the Marshalsea at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the one miserable yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was pointed out to every one. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls, she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates, outside of which she had never slept in her life. Her original timidity had grown with this concealment, and her light step and her little figure shunned the thronged streets while they passed along them. Worldly — Charles Dickens

Twelve "shame categories" have emerged from my research: Appearance and body image Money and work Motherhood/fatherhood Family Parenting Mental and physical health Addiction Sex Aging Religion Surviving trauma Being stereotyped or labeled — Brene Brown

I never imagined being undead would be so much work," Jeff lamented.
"Being a 'vampire' takes no work at all," Timothy emphasized vampire. "It's surviving that takes all the work. — Ben Tousey

To a billion people around the world surviving on just a dollar a day, the question of what to eat tonight is more about life and death than about recipes. The struggle of poor people around the globe weighs heavily on me, especially now that I am a mother, which is why I work with Oxfam. — Giada De Laurentiis

When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I tell myself, as sternly as possible, that is how things work here. We do dangerous things and people die. People die, and we move on to the next dangerous thing. The sooner that lesson sinks in, the better chance I have at surviving initiation. — Veronica Roth

Darwin struggled for a very long time with the problem of evolution being wrong but finally came up with the answer: it's all the fault of the females. . . The females aren't crazy at all. If a female sees a magnificent work of art, she knows she's dealing with an experienced male - a male who's good at surviving and who has enough time to spare to create a beautiful work of art. He's got to be a strong and healthy male, the kind of male you'd want to father your children. — Jan Paul Schutten