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If a task has once begun.
Never leave it till it's done.
Be the labor great or small.
Do it well or not at all.
-Anon.
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"The Devil finds work for idle hands."
First Appeared in 1721
-Proverb, 1721
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Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
-Antonin Artaud, 1947
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We always compare our labor with its results. We do not devote more effort to a given task if we can accomplish it with less; nor, when confronted with two toilsome tasks, do we choose the greater. We are more inclined to diminish the ratio of effort to result, and if, in so doing, we gain a little leisure, nothing will stop us from using it, for the sake of additional benefits, in enterprises more in keeping with our tastes.
Man's universal practice, indeed, is conclusive in this regard. Always and everywhere, we find that he looks upon toil as the disagreeable aspect, and on satisfaction as the compensatory aspect, of his condition. Always and everywhere, we find that, as far as he is able, he places the burden of his toil upon animals, the wind, steam, or other forces of Nature, or, alas! upon his fellow men, if he can gain mastery over them. In this last case, let me repeat, for it is too often forgotten, the labor has not been lessened; it has merely been shifted to other shoulders.
-Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies, “War”
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"Victories are easy and cheap. The only victories worth anything are those achieved through hard work and dedication."
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.
-Robert Benchley
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"There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone--many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF -- 'Thank God It's Friday.' They live for the weekends, when they can go do what they really want to do."
-Richard Nelson Bolles, What Color is Your Parachute?, 1970
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Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.
-Hal Borland
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We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living.
-Charles R. Brown
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"Find a job you like and you add five days to every week."
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, an existentialist short essay
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"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mudswamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;—draining off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labour is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,—to all knowledge, “self-knowledge” and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it.“
-Thomas Carlyle, "Past and Present", 1843
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If you can't be bothered to work on Saturday, don't bother to come in on Sunday.
-Jay Chiat, Unofficial work code of advertising agency Chiat/Day
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I didn't want to work. It was as simple as that. I distrusted work, disliked it. I thought it was a very bad thing that the human race had unfortunately invented for itself.
-Agatha Christie, Endless Night [bk. 1 ch. 1], 1967
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"To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness."
-John Dewey
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"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
-Thomas Alva Edison, One of the many proverbs/sayings written by Thomas Edison.
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There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841
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"Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all."
-Sam Ewig
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"A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B."
-Fats Domino
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Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
-Gustave Flaubert
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It is a common thing for men to benumb their own arms, and make them as dead and useless by leaning too much upon them: so it is in a moral as well as a natural way: all the prudence and pains in the world avail nothing without God. So saith the Psalmist, in Psalm cxxvii. 2. “It is in vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrow, for so he giveth his beloved sleep.”
A man would think, he that rises betimes fares hard, works hard, sits up late, cannot but be a thriving man; and probably he would be so, if God's blessing did second his diligence and frugality. But the Psalmist intends it of diligence in a separate sense; a diligent hand working alone, and then it is all in vain, and serves only to confirm the common proverb—Early up and never the nearer. Labour without God cannot prosper; and labour against God will not only destroy itself, but the laborer too.
-John Flavel, Sermon: The Successful Seaman
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If the career you have chosen has some unexpected inconvenience, console yourself by reflecting that no career is without them.
-Jane Fonda
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The object of living is work, experience, happiness. There is joy in work. All that money can do is buy us someone else's work in exchange for our own. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.
-Henry Ford, "Quoted in Forbes", January 1, 1963
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When men are employed, they are best contented; for on the days they worked they were good-natured and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good day's work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome.
-Benjamin Franklin
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"Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live."
-Margaret Fuller
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"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there."
-Indira Gandhi
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"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
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"Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy."
-Kahlil Gibran
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Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
-Ellen Goodman
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The man who wins is the average man,
Not built on any particular plan;
Not blessed with any particular luck –
Just steady and earnest and full of pluck.
The man who wins is the man who works,
Who neither labor nor trouble shirks;
Who uses his hands, his head, his eyes-
The man who wins is the man who tries.
-Conrad Hilton, from autobiography "Be My Guest", 1957
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Any supervisor worth his salt would rather deal with people who attempt too much than with those who try too little.
-Lee Iacocca
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"When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt."
-Henry J. Kaiser
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"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."
-Stephen King
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"A man working is a symbol of mankind at its best. It is a monument of concentration, of pooling knowledge and experience, of fitting facts and figures, towards the creation of usefulness."
-Ronald C. M. Koh, (quotation submitted to Quoteland)
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Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.
-Doug Larson
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Vineyards and shining harvests, pastures, arbors,
And all this our very utmost toil
Can hardly care for, we wear down our strength
Whether in oxen or in men, we dull
The edges of our ploughshares, and in return
Our fields turn mean and stingy, underfed,
And so today the farmer shakes his head,
More and more often sighing that his work,
The labour of his hands, has come to naught.
-Lucretius, The Way Things Are, Book II
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"Work is the true elixir of life. The busiest man is the happiest man. Excellence in any art or profession is attained only by hard and persistent work. Never believe that you are perfect. When a man imagines, even after years of striving, that he has attained perfection, his decline begins."
-Sir Theodore Martin, Said at reaching the age of 92
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To get the whole world out of bed
And washed, and dressed, and warmed, and fed,
To work, and back to bed again,
Believe me, Saul, costs worlds of pain.
-John Edward Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy
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"The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel would be the fearful noise and disorder during rush hours. It is something so different from the steady work in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad management. But it is really quite unavoidable...by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be economized. You cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the last moment, by which time a mass of other work has accumulated, and then to do it all together, in frantic haste. The result is that at meal-times everyone is doing two men's work, which is impossible without noise and quarreling. Indeed the quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that during rush hours the whole staff cursed like demons."
-George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
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A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood.
-General George Patton
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"Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock."
-Pablo Picasso
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"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men."
http://www.inaugural05.com/history/37.aspx
-Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address
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The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
-John Ruskin
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"Good-morrow to thee; welcome:
Thou look'st like him that knows a warlike charge:
To business that we love we rise betime,
And go to't with delight."
-William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra. Act IV. Scene iii., Said by Antony to "armed soldier"
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This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
-George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (Epistle Dedicatory To Arthur Bingham Walkley), 1903
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"He profits most who serves best."
Sheldon had attended the 1910 convention in Chicago, and had spoken a similar phrase to the assembled delegates, "He profits most who serves his fellows best." When the reading of the Business Methods report was finished, Pinkham jumped to his feet and said, "Here is a positive affirmation packaged in six words. Those words should be put into Rotary's platform." The conventioneers agreed with a thunderous round of applause and a standing ovation. The Rotary Platform passed by acclamation on a voice vote. http://www.rotaryhistoryfellowship.org/leaders/sheldon/platform.htm
-Arthur F. Sheldon, [Currently, Rotary's Motto.]
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The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.
-Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir. Vol. i. P. 130.
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The real minimum wage is zero [unemployment].
-Thomas Sowell
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The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, (attributed)
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"Work is a necessary evil to be avoided."
-Mark Twain
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In my day, there were things that were done, and things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing things that were not done.
-Peter Ustinov
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"The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost."
-William Carlos Williams
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Divide your movements into easy-to-do sections. If you fail, divide again.
-Peter Nivio Zarlenga
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Books about Work
