At Work

“There are few, if any, jobs in which abil­ity alone is suf­fi­cient. Needed, also, are loy­alty, sin­cer­ity, enthu­si­asm and team play.” –William B. Given, Jr.

“When peo­ple go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.” –Betty Bender

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordi­nary men. No machine can do the work of one extra­or­di­nary man.” –Elbert Hubbard

“To find joy in work is to dis­cover the foun­tain of youth.” –Pearl S. Buck

“One of the symp­toms of an approach­ing ner­vous break­down is the belief that one’s work is ter­ri­bly impor­tant.” –Bertrand Russell

“Oppor­tu­nity is missed by most peo­ple because it is dressed in over­alls and looks like work.” –Thomas A. Edison

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” –Theodore Roosevelt

“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is pro­duc­tion or accom­plish­ment and to either of these ends there must be fore­thought, sys­tem, plan­ning, intel­li­gence, and hon­est pur­pose, as well as per­spi­ra­tion. Seem­ing to do is not doing.” –Thomas A. Edison

“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

“When your work speaks for itself, don’t inter­rupt.” –Henry J. Kaiser

“The world is full of will­ing peo­ple, some will­ing to work, the rest will­ing to let them.” –Robert Frost

“Peo­ple might not get all they work for in this world, but they must cer­tainly work for all they get.” –Fred­er­ick Douglass

“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.” –John Ruskin

“So much of what we call man­age­ment con­sists in mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to work.” –Peter Drucker

“Noth­ing is really work unless you would rather be doing some­thing else.” –James M. Barrie

“Real suc­cess is find­ing your life­work in the work that you love.” –David McCullough

“The more I want to get some­thing done, the less I call it work.” –Richard Bach

“The impor­tant work of mov­ing the world for­ward does not wait to be done by per­fect men.” –George Eliot

“When­ever it is in any way pos­si­ble, every boy and girl should choose as his life work some occu­pa­tion which he should like to do any­how, even if he did not need the money.” –William Lyon Phelps

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” –Thomas Jefferson

“You’ve achieved suc­cess in your field when you don’t know whether what you’re doing is work or play.” –War­ren Beatty

“The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excel­lence of the work he pro­duces.” –Thomas Aquinas

“The secret of joy in work is con­tained in one word — excel­lence. To know how to do some­thing well is to enjoy it.” –Pearl Buck

“Plans are only good inten­tions unless they imme­di­ately degen­er­ate into hard work.” –Peter Drucker

“Suc­cess in busi­ness requires train­ing and dis­ci­pline and hard work. But if you’re not fright­ened by these things, the oppor­tu­ni­ties are just as great today as they ever were.” –David Rockefeller

“If you see some­one with­out a smile, give them one of yours.” — Dolly Parton