Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Work & Career (26 Quotes)

Work and thou canst escape the reward whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

Do your work, but do your thing.

Works of great intellect are great only by comparison with each other.

Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world as invalids pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live my life is for itself, and not for spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask for primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from a man to his actions.

Work'I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and astronomy.

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of chance.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which must yet have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.

Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

Wherever work is done, victory is attained.

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.

To help the young soul, to add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame to redeem defeat by new thought and firm action, this, though not easy, is the work of divine man.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.

He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.

The pleasure of life is according to the man who lives it, and not according to the work or the place

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade.

Work is victory.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Every really able man, in whatever direction he work ... if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

Don't waste life in doubts and fears spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hours duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.