Work Is What You Do So You Don't Have to Work Anymore

Contrary to popular belief, unemployment and retirement are a time to build some real character. I am now 61 years old and have been unemployed for over half my adult life. This is a good thing, by the way. Whenever friends or acquaintances announce that they have either got  fired or laid off their jobs, my response is, “Congratulations.”


After I said this to a friend who quit his job during an economic recession not so long ago, his face lit up, before he started laughing and remarked, “You are the only one who has said this to me. Everyone else is asking me things like ‘How could you during a recession? Jobs are so hard to come by!’ or ‘How are you going to survive?’ ”


I congratulate people who have quit or lost their jobs because I know that for creative and innovative people who want real success in their  lives, this is an opportunity for them to go on to something not only better, but something great!


Here are some of my favorite quotes about work and retirement to put work in proper perspective.


#1 of Top-10 Work Quotes


The work ethic is a terrible mistake — a cute term gone haywire.
— from Life's Secret Handbook


#2 of Top-10 Quotes about Work


What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work — not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.
— Mark Twain


#3 of Top-10 Work Quotes


Gainfully unemployed — very proud of it, too.
— Charles Baxter

 #4 of Top-10 Work Quotes

By the age of 65, most of us have accomplished whatever work-related goals we are going to reach. If you haven't done it by then, chances are you aren't going to do it. Take the retirement, take the pension, take the Social Security, and sail off into the sunset.
— Sue Lasky


#5 of Top-10 Quotes about Work


Working at a real job you don't like (instead of a unreal job you like) is a lame way to spend a good portion of your life.
— Unknown Wise Person


#6 of Top-10 Work Quotes


Work is what you do so that sometime you won’t have to do it anymore.
— Alfred Polgar


#7 of Top-10 Work Quotes


We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
— Oscar Wilde

#8 of Top-10 Work Quotes


All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
— Aristotle


#9 of Top-10 Work Quotations


In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it — not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.
— W. H. Auden




#10 of Top-10 Work Quotes


If you hate your job, of all the thirty-seven alternatives, running away is best
— Unknown wise person

If more individuals read The Joy of Not Working and The World's Best Retirement Book, they  would be better able to handle leisure time and wouldn't have as many fears and worries about retirement.