Workaholism Quotes

“Work can sometimes be very tricky. It gives with one hand and takes away with the other. It gives you money and takes away your time. It offers you wealth and steals your happiness.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“We’ve each given the hours of our lives in dull rote jobs for other men’s profit, and have been asked to be grateful for doing that.”
― Charles Bukowski, Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays, Volume 2 : 1946-1992

“Many of us learned that keeping busy…kept us at a distance from our feelings...Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves—becoming overachievers & workaholics—as self esteem…But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice…If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive activity.”
― Maureen Brady, Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse

“There is a treadmill quality to workaholism.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.”
― Maureen Brady, Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse

“James Buchanan's niece: "He often worked just for work's sake.”
― Bruce Chadwick, 1858: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See

“For years, I had used these fractured men to justify my cynicism and workaholism, and the grief, insomnia and casual anorexia were no longer of any interest to me.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“Own the amount of time you spend at work as a choice, not a consequence. Don’t play the victim of your job.

Hard work is a high. It is. Don’t forget what you’re reaching for while getting high on work.”
― Richie Norton

“For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year’s Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love

“In November, Bettina [Moreira] presented him with a framed quotation by the biologist George Wald, who had won the Nobel fifty years ago. It read: What one really needs is not Nobel laureates but love. How do you think one gets to be a Nobel laureate? Wanting love, that’s how. Wanting it so bad that one works all the time and ends up a Nobel laureate. It’s a consolation prize. What matters is love. ‘What the hell do you want me to do with this?’ said Chandra, who had come to a similar conclusion himself but would sooner be damned than tell Ms. Moreira this.”
― Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

“Remember your created limits. So much of workaholism is a defiance of the physical limitations that God our creator has imposed upon us.”
― Tim Challies

“Everyone has a need to feel a sense of self-worth and self-actualization – that he or she believes his or her existence is meaningful. Unfortunately, the Industrial Revolution wrongfully instilled a social norm that self-worth should primarily come from work ethic – if you work hard, you will be rewarded. But because of AI, jobs based on repetitive tasks will soon be gone forever.

We need to redefine the idea of work ethic for the new workforce paradigm. The importance of a job should not be solely dependent on its economic value but should also be measured by what it adds to society. We should also reassess our notion that longer work hours are the best way to achieve success and should remove the stigma associated with service professions.”
― Kai-Fu Lee

“For the worker bee, life is given over to the grim satisfaction of striking a firm line through a task accomplished. On to the next, and the next. Check, check. Done and done. It explains—and solves—nothing to call this workaholism.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Today a cultural challenge is to move from the dogma of "Work therefore I am" to the creative (almost neo-Cartesian) paradigm of "I think, create and solve problems therefore I am useful":”
― Luigina Sgarro

“Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“Flow destroys the idea that you have to be constantly working or grinding to get what you want. When you embrace the concept of flow, that energized, full-of-focus way of being, you can more naturally embrace rest, recovery, and reflection as essential pieces of a fulfilled life.”
― Amanda W. Jenkins, Go From Hustle to Flow: Yoga + Mindset Practice to Release Overwhelm, Cultivate Peace + Redefine Success

“Workaholics can lose everything except the work.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Workaholics turn vacations into work, too. We've also seen how the time around vacations becomes especially important to workaholics, who become consumed with the idea that they have to work harder before and after to make up for the time off”
― Malissa Clark, Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business--and How to Fix It

“When I turned 15, my father let me drive our old ’66 Chevy Impala and I was finally able to get a “real” job – at a fast-food restaurant. Where else at that age? I never stopped working. For most of my life, I worked a good 15-20 hours a day, for years, and I made the mistake of thinking I was damn near invincible, only to eventually find out I wasn’t.”
― Scott C. Holstad