In many ways, September feels like the busiest time of the year: The kids go back to school, work piles up after the summer’s dog days, and Thanksgiving is suddenly upon us.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

I like working. That’s when I’m feeling my best. And the people around me know that. My wife knows that.

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.

This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

O God, we praise Thee for keeping us till this day, and for the full assurance that Thou wilt never let us go.

I will never retire unless I have to.

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‚tap-dancing to work.‘

That summer after the draft was probably the most fun I’ve ever had, because all I had to do every day was wake up and go work out for four or five hours. I got to play some golf, which I love to do, too, and then got to hang out with my family.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won’t have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

People tried to change my concept of what music is. That music is work, but it’s not like that.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.

We’re going to have to work. We’re going to have to play well. Nothing will be given to us.

Outsourcing is inevitable, and I don’t think it’s necessarily treating people like things.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

If I went to work in a factory the first thing I’d do is join a union.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

Where there is no work, there is no dignity.

I only want my work to make people happy.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

Work alone is noble.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can’t help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won’t want to worry.

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

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

I am the center of attention in my job every single day; the thought of a wedding to me is exhausting. Why would I put myself through that?

I’ve been pleased to work with so many wonderful stars through the years. This has been an amazing journey. I hope it continues.

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

Gentleness doesn’t get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

It feels good to have your work respected again.

The Roman Curia has its defects, but it seems to me that people often overemphasize its defects and talk too little about the health of the many religious and laypeople who work there.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

A man who has no office to go, to I don’t care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

We were at a beach one summer, and I had a bathing suit on. My wife looked at me and said: ‚Boy, you are skinny, aren’t you?‘ I said: ‚Honey, I’d like to remind you that it was minor defects like this that kept me from getting a better wife.‘

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.

I think that is a better thing than thanksgiving: thanks-living. How is this to be done? By a general cheerfulness of manner, by an obedience to the command of Him by whose mercy we live, by a perpetual, constant delighting of ourselves in the Lord, and by a submission of our desires to His will.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.