Work Quotes

Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, mine.

I worked with the Groundlings, doing sketch comedy and improv at a theater here in L.A. It was my hobby, but I took classes and stayed passionate about it because it's what I wanted to do. It just fit. It takes a while before you can actually make money at it. I worked for years.

Never follow somebody else's path; it doesn't work the same way twice for anyone... the path follows you and rolls up behind you as you walk, forcing the next person to find their own way.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

There are three ways by which an individual can get wealth—by work, by gift, and by theft. And, clearly, the reason why the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so much.

The more my people work, the less vices they will have

Markets work; morals matter.

A leader's job is not to do the work for others, it's to help others figure out how to do it themselves, to get things done, and to succeed beyond what they thought possible.

Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.

Eight hours daily labor is enough for any human being

The question of prostitutes will give rise to many serious problems here. Take them back to productive work, bring them into the social economy. That is what we must do. But it is difficult and a complicated task to carry out in the present conditions of our economic life and in all the prevailing circumstances. There you have one aspect of the women’s problem which, after the seizure of power by the proletariat, looms large before us and demands a practical solution. It will give us a great deal of work here in Soviet Russia

There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

I'm not scared of anyone. I don't care whether you are a jiu-jitsu fighter or a wrestler or a stand-up fighter: I want to put myself against you, and I want to see who is better. And if you are the guy that is going to beat me, I'm going to take that loss like a man and go back, and I'll work on me self. That's how I look at fighting.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.

There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they all know about the one, but haven't tried the other. But I know all about both; and as far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down--and I will be satisfied, too. Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation and its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him--why certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair--but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

Sometimes hard work doesn't pay off.

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.

The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.