A forest of 77 quotes about work that inspire

On my former island home, I met a gentleman with whom I was going to collaborate on a community development project at the time. During our initial conversation, our rapport was easeful and we were aligned on many of the issues, but then he said to me, “This island has too many trees.” Cue the awkward silence. I’m sure he could see my entire body stiffen. I let the silence grow between us to indicate my disagreement. In my world, there’s no such thing as “too many trees”.

I never brought up the issue with him again, however, his remark became the source of my own inside joke. Whenever anything is claimed as being “too much”, I will always quip “there’s no such thing as ‘too many trees’”.

Given our current social media landscape, I’m sure some might say “there’s too many inspirational quotes”, however, just like trees, I maintain there’s no such thing. As a person who, for the last 15 years, has spent much of my working days writing and talking about the concept of inspired work, to me there is no such thing as “too much inspiration”. I still appreciate quotes that inspire, especially those that convey what I believe about work in such an eloquent and succinct way.

Why quotes inspire us

The feeling of being inspired is an indication of alignment with our truth. Many of the following quotes are expressed from fundamental truths that resonate with our shared humanity. As we read the words, we connect with our own felt sense of knowing – knowing the truth about our value, about our connection with all of existence, and about the significance of our aliveness. These truthful words are powerful. They can shift our perception and because our perception is what creates our reality, they can change our entire experience of being alive. Many of the following quotes have had that effect on me.

About discovering your inspired work

Work is not just the thing you do to pay the bills, it is the journey to remembering the truth of who you are.

When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
~ Wendell Berry

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.
~ Buddha

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you discover the reason why.
~ Mark Twain

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
~ Oriah

The word vocation is rooted in the latin for “voice”. Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue, it means a calling that I hear.
~ Parker Palmer

A [hu]man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence their heart first opened.
~ Albert Camus

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all you heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
~ Dale Carnegie

What if the word “work” was changed to “dance-with-life”? And instead of it being viewed as an alternative to fishing or a way of paying your dues, it was seen as a chance to meet a parade of new friends, discover your own untested potentials and unpolished gifts, and open avenues for abundance to come pouring into your life?
~ Mike Dooley

It is the first of all problems for a [hu]man to find out what kind of work they are to do in this universe.
~ Thomas Carlyle

If there is no bliss in our work, no passion or ecstasy, we have not yet found our work. We may have a job, but we do not yet have work.
~ Matthew Fox

A job is never just a job. It is always connected to a deep and invisible process of finding meaning in life through work.
~ Thomas Moore

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.
~ Studs Terkel

Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.
~ Ram Dass

We are not just looking for a job, but an activity that will make our lives make sense.
~ Unknown

About your gifts

You were born with everything you need to be in your highest service to the world.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
~ Emile Zola

The belief “I have to work” has never been true; it’s the lie you hold on to so that you can keep yourself from the joy of the gift that you give. No one has to work. No one has ever had to.
~ Byron Katie

Everyone has the perfect gift to give to the world – and if each of us freed up to give the gift that is uniquely ours to give, the world will be in total harmony.
~ Buckminster Fuller

You have unique gifts that no one but you can give. You have those gifts because you have a special role to play in the world that requires giving those gifts. When you are playing that role, you are living your personal destiny. When you are aligned with your destiny, your life is joyful, delightful, exciting and fulfilling.
~ Janet Attwood

About your dreams

Your dreams are the seeds of all that you will birth into the world.

Create the highest, grandest possible dream for your life because you become what you believe.
~ Oprah Winfrey

The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.
~ Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Our dream, the desire that is in our soul, did not come out of nowhere. Someone placed it there. And that Someone, who is pure love and wants only our happiness, did so only because he also gave us the tools to realize our dreams and our desires.
~ Paulo Coelho

To create a new world, we must first create a new dream.
~ John Perkins

I don’t have goals; I have fantasies. They’re exactly like goals but without the hard work.
~ Emily Levine

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
~ Henry David Thoreau

About your guiding principles

Your purpose, vision, and mission the guiding principles by which you orient your work to your own truth.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
~ Viktor Frankl

There is nothing for life but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm
~ Kazuo Ishiguro

The person without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder.
~ Thomas Carlyle

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.
~ Joseph Campbell

Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s needs.
~ Frederick Buechner

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
~ George Bernard Shaw

What every man needs, regardless of his job or the kind of work he is doing, is an objective and a purpose. He needs a feeling and a belief that he has some worthwhile thing to do. What this is no one can tell him. It must be his own creation.
~ Joseph M. Dodge

Visions must be big enough to let the universe offer us a thousand ways to realize them.
~ Dewitt Jones

About your inner work

Work is a synergistic relationship between your inner landscape and the outer world.

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
~ St. Augustine

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.
~ Lao Tzu

I get to do those big projects if I step out to the edge of myself and summon my courage to take the first step into the unknown. I get to do those Great Work projects if I have the resilience to keep going when I lose the path, run into resistance and the doubt of others.
~ Michael Bungay Stanier

What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.
~ Henry Stanley Haskins

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.
~ Carl Jung

About your unique expression

Your work is a platform for the expression of who you truly are.

You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
~ John Green

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.
~ Rumi

Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to ultimately be at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be.
~ Abraham Maslow

By the work one knows the workman.
~ Jean de La Fontaine

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
~ Martha Graham

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which they are best suited.
~ Napoleon Hill

True measure of success is the capacity to be your authentic self, which means bringing your whole self into your work, no matter where you are.
~ Gloria Burgess

Every [hu]man loves what they are good at.
~ Thomas Shadwell

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
~ Samuel Butler

Remember that you count, you are important, and that you have a unique and special contribution to make.
~ Sanaya Roman

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.
~ Joseph Campbell

About your role as creator

Your work is yet another medium through which you transmute energy into real world matter.

We must attend to what our inner guidance is nudging us toward.
~ Julia Cameron

If your dominant intent is to feel joy while you are doing the work, your triad of intentions – freedom, growth and joy – will come quickly and easily into alignment. See your “career” as one of creating a joyful life experience. You are not a creator of things or a regurgitator of what someone else has created or a gatherer of stuff. You are a creator, and the subject of your creation is your joyful life experience. That is your mission. That is your quest. That is why you are here.
~Abraham-Hicks

The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours. The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.
~ Hugh MacLeod

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
~ Benjamin Franklin

The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative.
~ Marianne Williamson

About being inspired

Work is an opportunity to allow life-force energy to flow through you into the world.

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.
~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.
~ Harold Whitman

When a work lifts your spirits and inspires bold and noble thoughts in you, do not look for any other standard to judge by: the work is good, the product of a master craftsman.
~ Jean de la Bruyère

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
~ Albert Camus

It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.
~ Federico Fellini

There is no higher qualification than genuine inspiration.
~ Tama Kieves

As long as you feel inspired your life is being well spent.
~ Hugh MacLeod

About working for money

Work is a channel through which we receive money, but when we expand our view of work, we see it as much more than just that.

I believe you are your work. Don’t trade the stuff of your life for nothing more than dollars. That’s a rotten bargain.
~ Rita Mae Brown

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.
~ Alan Watts

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
~ Woodrow Wilson

No amount of money or recognition can compensate you if you are not doing your life’s passionate creative work; and if you are not doing it, you had better draw everything to a complete stop until you can listen deeply to your soul, identify your heart’s true desire, and change direction. It’s that urgent.
~Leonard Wolf

One of the greatest difficulties for people surrounding work is the consistent and pernicious belief that they are working for money.
~ Lenedra Carroll

Life and livelihood ought not to be separated but to flow from the same source, which is Spirit, for both life and livelihood are about Spirit. Spirit means life, and both life and livelihood are about living in depth, living with meaning, purpose, joy and a sense of contributing to the greater community. A spirituality of work is about bringing life and livelihood back together again.
~ Matthew Fox

About the joy of work

When what we do in the world is aligned with who we are within, we experience joy.

When we delight in our work and the whole life of a person is ordered to do it, then it is called our life.
~ Thomas Aquinas

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
~ Steve Jobs

Do what you love in service of those who love what you do.
~ Steve Farber

Love the life you live. Live the life you love.
~ Bob Marley

To love life through labour is to be intimate with life's innermost secret. All work is empty save when there is love, for work is love made visible.
~ Kahlil Gibran

My occupation: Love. It’s all I do.
~ John of the Cross

We are in the business of creating miracles on earth. Anything less than that isn’t even worth trying.
~ Charles Eisenstein

Which is your favourite? If I haven’t included your favourite quote in the above list, please share it with me by emailing me here. As I said, there’s no such thing as “too much inspiration”. Or trees, for that matter.