Thankless Task 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

The translator's task is essentially a difficult and often a thankless one. He is severely criticized if he makes a mistake, but only faintly praised when he succeeds, for often it is assumed that anyone who know two languages ought to be able to do as well as the translator who has labored to produce a text. — Eugene A. Nida

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

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

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

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'd heard once in school that if a single bird were to transport all the sand, grain by grain, from the eastern seabord to the west coast of Africa, it would take ... I didn't catch the number of years, preferring to concentrate on the single bird chosen to perform this thankless task. It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work. Birds search for grubs and build their nests, but their leisure time is theirs to spend as they see fit. I pictured this bird looking down from the branches to say, "You want me to do what?" before flying off, laughing at the at the foolish story he now had to tell his friends. — David Sedaris

Teachers are sort of faced with a thankless task, because no matter how good they are, unless they find a way to personally rationalize the rewards of their effort, nobody else is really going to do it for them en masse. — Julius Erving