If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. --Antoine de Saint-Exupery (in Healing Civilization Nature's Way)

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. --David Whyte (in Gathering as a Form of Leadership)

A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Where there is no gift, there is no art. --Lewis Hyde (in Jane Baker: An Artist Who Gives It All Away)

The bonsai is not you working on the tree; you have to have the tree work on you. --John Naka (in The Atomic Tree)

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.
--John Muir (in Do You Remember Your Song)

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies. --Ram Dass (in Be Love Now)

Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground. --Sara Ahmed (in Going Into the Hospital: COVID 19 (Poem))

Without the playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. --Carl Jung (in Hidden Stories: Paintings by Diane Ding)

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. --Henri Frederic Amiel (in Advice from 100-Year-Olds)

This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. --Alan Watts (in Kiran Khalap: Navigating Business, Creativity and Spirituality)

If you have built castles in the air; your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. --Henry David Thoreau (in Re-Inventing Work: An Interview with Matthew Fox)

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. --Lilla Watson (in My Mother Against Apartheid)

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. --Confucius (in An Illustrated Poster for People Who Love Their Work)

My work is loving the world. --Mary Oliver (in Practicing the Art of Wonder: Lessons from the Hummingbird)

To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing- this is my constant work. --Suleika Jaouad (in What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living)

Of course the gift to be cherished most of all is that of life itself. One's work should be a salute to life. --Pablo Casals (in Legendary Cellist Pablo Casals, at Age 93, on Creative Vitality )

We dwell in the house of the body, but its perfection and intricate life are the work of a wisdom which never relaxes dominion over a single cell. --George William Russell (in Oncology Yoga: Tapping into the Wisdom of the Body)

We know now, for certain, that we do not live in an inert universe. How to work with clay knowing this? How do we embody information so that a living material becomes a threshold for healing our deracination from our true, our wild natures? --Paulus Berensohn (in To Spring from the Hand)

If we are to work together more intelligently, we will need to choose processes that evoke our curiosity, humility, generosity and wisdom. --Margaret Wheatley (in Solving Complex Problems Relying on Diversity and Inclusion)

May we find our foundation in the work of Love; demanding, tiring, true and human and holy. --Padraig O Tuama (in This Fantastic Argument of Being Alive)

As we work to create light for others, we naturally light our own way. --Mary Anne Radmacher (in Woodworker Anoo Kulkarni: Answering the Heart's Call)

Don't wait for an inspired ending to come to mind. Work your way to the ending and see what comes up. --Andy Weir (in The Egg: A Short Story By Andy Weir)

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood. --Fred Rogers (in The Politics of Play)

Nothing will work unless you do. --Maya Angelou (in A Brave and Startling Truth)

At 69, I'm eventually going to run out of time, so I'm lobbying to work on rainbows when I get to the other side. --Zoo Cain (in My Real Name: A Conversation with Zoo Cain)

The great beauty of life is its mystery, the inability to know what course our life will take, and diligently work to transmute into our final form based upon a lifetime of constant discovery and enterprising effort. --Kilroy J. Oldster (in You Don't Know What Your Future Self Wants)

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. --Eleanor Roosevelt (in 3 Steps to Build Peace & Create Change)

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood. --Fred Rogers (in A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth)

You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect. --Tricia Hersey (in The Seven Types of Rest Everyone Needs)

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you. --Anne Lamott (in Advice from Teens on Social Media Use)

Our spiritual work is, at its heart, finding a sacred peace in the present, which will change, and which will end. --adrienne maree brown (in Murmurations: Breaking is Part of Healing)

One must grow a culture and community of fellow seekers, each aiming to break the mechanical patterns of their thought. This is what I mean by indirect work. --Carol Sanford (in Carol Sanford: Indirect Work)

Everywhere people ask: "What can I actually do?" The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. --E.F. Schumacher (in Gems of Wisdom from Small is Beautiful)

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship, or family, or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. --Maria Popova (in What Does Love Mean? How 4-8 Year-Old Kids Describe Love)