Humor can be a powerful tool to diffuse a stressful or annoying situation, and it can reduce negative feelings. According to research conducted by HBS with the Wharton School humor can boost your status at work, persuading others that you’re both more confident and more competent than you may actually be. Here are 30 funny work quotes that are guaranteed to make you smile.
- “I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” – Jerome K. Jerome
- “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.” – Robert Benchley
- “I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.” – Charles Lamb
- “The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one.” – Oscar Wilde
- “If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn’t have a job if he was any smarter.” – John Gotti
- “No man goes before his time – unless the boss leaves early.” – Groucho Marx
- “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” – Bill Gates
- “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.” – Drew Carey
- “A baseball game is twice as much fun if you’re seeing it on the company’s time.” – William Feather
- “Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.” – Orson Scott Card
- “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.” – Harry S. Truman
- “Doing nothing is very hard to do… you never know when you’re finished.” – Leslie Nielsen
- “My son is now an ‘entrepreneur.’ That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job.” – Ted Turner
- “I used to sell furniture for a living. The trouble was, it was my own.” – Les Dawson
- “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.'” – Dave Barry
- “If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.” – Lane Kirkland
- “One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his or her work important.” – Bertrand Russell
- “I truly believe the wireless mouse was invented so people at work had one less thing to hang themselves with.” – Mike Vanatta
- “Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.” – Voltaire
- “The first thing a new employee should do on the job is learn to recognize his boss’ voice on the phone.” – Martin Buxbaum
- “Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.” – Don Herold
- “Sometimes the best part of my job is that the chair swivels.” – Unknown Author
- “The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.” – Robert Frost
- “Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you’re just sitting still?” – J. Paul Getty
- “Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else.” – Barbara Ehrenreich
- “People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.” – Ogden Nash
- “Teamwork is essential – it allows you to blame someone else.” – Unknown Author
- “The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vince Lombardi
- “My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.” – Indira Gandhi
- “The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.” – Stanley J. Randall
- “Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired.” – Michel Tournier
- “Eventually the person who tries to fix the problem will be blamed for causing it.” – Robert Breault
- “Most people like hard work, particularly when they’re paying for it.” – Elbert Hubbard
- “A foolproof plan for not getting a job – show up for your interview wearing flip flops.” – Alan Davies
- “The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.” – Casey Stengel