Here are the best work-life balance quotes to help you recognize your priorities in life.
Work-life balance is a term that has spread throughout different industries worldwide. Well, it’s no surprise as this topic is relevant to everyone who works for themselves and their families.
But, though the term is popular, many people still don’t understand what it really means. To have a good work-life balance means you have a healthy and happy working environment.
It also means that you have enough time for yourself and family and friends.
The term’s definition constantly evolves, but these are the main topics usually tied to it. Aside from the apparent benefits, work-life balance is also crucial for mental health.
If you’re constantly stressed out and have anxiety at work, then your performance will also suffer.
And, because you’re in such a stressed state at work, there’s a big possibility that you’ll also bring these unpleasant feelings into your home.
Just from these things, we can already see why work-life balance is essential.
But, to help you better understand the term and its benefits, we’ve gathered some great quotes for you to read. Make sure you don’t miss out!
Start here.
And don’t forget to check out these balance quotes and work ethic quotes.
Best Work-Life Balance Quotes
1. “You can’t truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.” – Zig Ziglar
2. “Balance is a feeling derived from being whole and complete; it’s a sense of harmony. It is essential to maintaining quality of life and work.” – Joshua Osenga
3. “Work-life balance is not an entitlement or benefit. Your company cannot give it to you. You have to create it for yourself.” – Matthew Kelly
4. “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” – Stephen Covey
5. “Work is just a part of our life, not vice versa. So live life full-time; work, work, part-time.” – Vikrmn
6. “You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” – Charles Buxton
7. “The gift of balance in your life—may you find the balance of life, time for work but also time for play. Too much of one thing ends up creating stress that no one needs in their life.” – Catherine Pulsifer
8. “The challenge of work-life balance is without question one of the most significant struggles faced by modern man.” – Stephen Covey
9. “There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.” – Alain de Botton
Famous Work-Life Balance Quotes
10. “Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” – Dolly Parton
11. “You can’t do a good job if your job is all you do.” – Katie Thurmes
12. “Always take some of the play, fun, freedom, and wonder of the weekend into your week and your work.” – Rasheed Ogunlaru
13. “You have to balance your passions, not your time.” – Lisa Sugar
14. “Balance is not better time management, but better boundary management. Balance means making choices and enjoying those choices.” – Betsy Jacobson
15. “Don’t confuse having a career with having a life.” – Hillary Clinton
Also read: Famous Quotes
Work-Life Balance Quotes to Motivate You
16. “You can’t have everything you want, but you can have the things that really matter to you. And thinking that way empowers you to work really hard for a really long period of time.” – Marissa Mayer
17. “You do have choices about how you spend your time. Balancing what you need to do with what you want to do can lead to happiness and success.” – Stephen Hall
18. “Burnout is about resentment. Preventing it is about knowing yourself well enough to know what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful.” – Marissa Mayer
19. “You don’t have to make yourself miserable to be successful. Success isn’t about working hard, it’s about working smart.” – Andrew Wilkinson
20. “Remember that work and life coexist. Wellness at work follows you home and vice versa. The same goes for when you’re not well, fuelled, or fulfilled. Work and life aren’t opposing forces to balance; they go hand-in-hand and are intertwined as different elements of the same person—you.” – Melissa Steginus
21. “When you have balance in your life, work becomes an entirely different experience. There is a passion that moves you to a whole new level of fulfillment and gratitude, and that’s when you can do your best, for yourself and for others.” – Cara Delevingne
Also read: Grind Quotes
Wise Work-Life Balance Quotes to Live By
22. “We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‘to-do’ list.” – Michelle Obama
23. “Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.” – Gustave Flaubert
24. “Reconsider your definitions. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
25. “If you feel burnout setting in, if you feel demoralized and exhausted, it is best—for the sake of everyone—to withdraw and restore yourself.” – Dalai Lama
26. “Life will always get busy. Make time to do the things you love.” – Lailah Gifty Akita
Also read: Quotes to Live By, Burnout Quotes
Work-Life Balance Quotes That’ll Help You See the Value of Family and Friends
27. “It’s all about the quality of life and finding a happy balance between work and friends and family.” – Philip Green
28. “Invest in your work-life balance. Time with friends and family is as important as time at work. Getting that out of balance is a path toward unhappiness.” – Stephen Gillett
29. “No matter how busy you are, or how busy you think you are, the work will always be there tomorrow, but your friends might not be.” – Anonymous
30. “The more often you decline invitations to spend time with friends or family because you are too busy with either work or other activities, the more you should realize that your life is not in balance.” – Byron Pulsifer
Work-Life Balance Quotes That’ll Change Your Perspective
31. “Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them—work, family, health, friends, and spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.” – Brian Dyson
32. “No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office.’” – Paul Tsongas
33. “We have overstretched our personal boundaries and forgotten that true happiness comes from living an authentic life fueled with a sense of purpose and balance.” – Dr. Kathleen Hall
34. “A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.” – Marilyn Monroe
35. “To have someone who never makes a mistake, never finds her personal life in disarray, never worries about work-life balance? I think that would be unreal.” – Sophie Kinsella
36. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” – Jack Torrance
37. “I think taking vacations and turning off the phone and only doing emails or social media for a specific short amount of time helps with work-life balance. If I’m checking it all day, I start to feel like a cuckoo bird. So I just do it once or twice a day instead of a thousand. And then remembering that it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.” – Maria Bamford
38. “The consistency in your person from home to work is vitally important so that you are in total balance at all times. Being out of balance means that your true self will start to be confused with what you pretend to be.” – Catherine Pulsifer
39. “It’s not about balance, it’s about designing a work-home-family life that makes you feel good—a life you don’t need a vacation from.” – Jacqueline Fisch
Deep Work-Life Balance Quotes to Reflect On
40. “A time for everything—a time to relax and a time to be busy, a time to frolic and a time to labor, a time to receive and a time to give, a time to begin and a time to finish.” – Johnathan Lockwood Huie
41. “You will never feel truly satisfied by work until you are satisfied by life.” – Heather Schuck
42. “Work, love, and play are the great balance wheels of man’s being.” – Orison Swett Marden
43. “Framing the issue of work-life balance—as if the two were dramatically opposed—practically ensures work will lose out. Who would ever choose work over life?” – Sheryl Sandberg
44. “What is a work-life imbalance? It’s, ‘I feel safe at home, I don’t feel safe at work.’ That’s the imbalance. And no amount of yoga or vacation time is going to fix that.” – Simon Sinek
45. “You don’t want work-life balance. You want work-life freedom. You want a time-centered seamless lifestyle. You want time flexibility—the flexibility to spend your time where, when, and how you want.” – Richie Norton
46. “There is no work-life balance. We have one life. What’s most important is that you be awake for it.” – Janice Marturano
47. “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” – Sydney J. Harris
Work-Life Balance Quotes for Parents Who Need Advice
48. “When in doubt, choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.” – Anna Quindlen
49. “Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.” – Regina Brett
50. “The workplace today is very demanding, and you really can’t have your life as a working mom the way it was before the baby. So work-life balance for you should be about trade-offs at one time or the other.” – Grace Esse
51. “When you’re gone, would you rather have your gravestone say, ‘He never missed a meeting?’ Or one that said, ‘He was a great father.’” – Steve Blank
52. “When I think about work-life balance, I don’t imagine it as a perfect day where I got to spend the exact right amount of time having an impact at work and snuggling with my kids at home. I never achieve that. But over the course of a month, or a quarter, or a year, I try to make time for the people and experiences I value.” – Jane Park
53. “I have so much admiration for women who are mothers, who balance family and work.” – Beyoncé
54. “The work-life balance is a harsh reality for so many women who are forced every day to make impossible choices. Do they take their kids to the doctor—and risk getting fired? Do they work weekends so they can afford to send their kids to better childcare—even though it means even less time with their families? Do they take another shift at work, so they can pay for piano lessons for their kids—even though it means they have to stop volunteering for the PTA? It just shouldn’t be this difficult to raise healthy families.” – Michelle Obama
More Work-Life Balance Quotes That You’ll Learn From
55. “I believe a balanced life is essential, and I try to make sure that all of our employees know that and live that way. Why shouldn’t your workplace reflect your values? Why is ‘giving back’ not a part of our jobs? The answer for us is to integrate philanthropy with work.” – Marc Benioff
56. “Take care of yourself. When you don’t sleep, eat crap, don’t exercise, and are living off adrenaline for too long, your performance suffers. Your decisions suffer. Your company suffers.” – Ev Williams
57. “We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.” – Arianna Huffington
58. “It’s true what they say about men in New York. They all work too much. Devote too much time to their careers, not enough to love, to family.” – A.D. Aliwat
59. “One of the major issues plaguing human potential in the corporate world today is work-life balance. The term itself diminishes our ability to make the case that work can be a richly rewarding part of a person’s life and should in many ways be personal.” – Matthew Kelly
60. “Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved work-life balance—whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘Six Things Successful People Do Before 7:00 a.m.’ The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.” – Oliver Burkeman
Do You Think You’ve Got Your Priorities Straight?
The past few years’ events have taken a toll on our physical and mental health. Given the circumstances, it’s been increasingly hard to balance work, self, family, and friends. Sometimes, the lines get blurred, and we feel like work is creeping into the boundaries of our personal lives.
Though this is entirely normal, it’s not something that society should readily accept. Working from home, working overtime, or bringing work home allows us less time to spend with family and friends. We drown ourselves with work and thus forget about what really matters most.
Yes, we need to work hard to achieve success. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean working ourselves to the bone, disregarding our other priorities and the other aspects of our lives.
We need to actively recognize and draw the line between work and personal life to achieve this sense of balance—this work-life balance—that we’re all trying to reach for. It may not be easy, but it’s definitely not impossible.
Remember that life isn’t only made up of work. A bulk of our lives should revolve around our passions, our loved ones, and the things that make us happy. With that, we hope this list of the best work-life balance quotes was able to open your eyes to things that you should prioritize and focus on.
What do you think of your life now? Did any of the quotes resonate with you? Share your thoughts below.
