Paulo Coelho Quotes

Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.

Why should people be expected to think about the meaning of life merely because they happen to be ill? That is just the time when there is no time to think about such things, because the body is so greedy for attention.

Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

To make a living is no longer enough. Work also has to make a life.

Life is not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and working are for life.

Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.

It's perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a job that's meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation is and find some way to express it. Then you won't confuse your job with the meaning of your life.

The children are being conditioned to think that the purpose of life is to get a good job. You get paid but you don't get satisfaction from your work.

I don't want to think my life as a career. I'm interested in my work only because of the meaning I can make.

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labor a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.

A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.

I've always been a big proponent of not working for the sake of working, because I don't want to work for the rest of my life - I want to live.

I like to think that death gives life meaning. I like that philosophy.

Those who are excluded from meaningful work are, by an large, excluded from meaningful play.

Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

I was the person who did academics until the middle of the day, then went on auditions. I think there was a moment later in my life where I was like, "What am I doing? Why am I so serious?" .

Understanding that what it is that you're doing isn't limited to the roles and the rejection, it's bigger than that, it's about your purpose in life.

Work is the only thing that gives substance to life.

I don't think we are here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating a good lunch.

In the long run, doing work that's important leads to more happiness than doing work that's merely profitable.

First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?

The first thing I think of when I wake up is how close I am to death. But then it gets better during the day.