Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there.
—Gary Snyder
No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
—Dorothy Day
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
—Jack London
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
—Peter Drucker
Without labor nothing prospers.
—Sophocles
One is always seeking the touchstone that will dissolve one's deficiencies as a person and as a craftsman. And one is always bumping up against the fact that there is none except hard work, concentration, and continued application.
—Paul William Gallico
It is not hard work which is dreary; it is superficial work.
—Edith Hamilton
No group or class should be freed from doing the toil of the culture. One of our current problems is that there are too many people who simply have no idea how much unpleasant, tedious, and repetitive work is required to support their "high-level" activities, and how ineffective they would be without the effort of those they all too often disdain.
—Robert Theobold
I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
—Thomas Jefferson
When you go to work, if your name is on the building, you’re rich. If your name is on your desk, you’re middle-class. If your name is on your shirt, you’re poor.
—Rich Hall
During the contest for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, John F. Kennedy visited a mine in West Virginia. “Is it true you’re the son of one of our wealthiest men?” asked one of the miners there. Kennedy admitted that this was true. “Is it true that you’ve never wanted for anything and had everything you wanted?” “I guess so,” Kennedy replied. “Is it true you’ve never done a day’s work with your hands all your life?” Kennedy nodded. “Well, let me tell you this,” said the miner. “You haven’t missed a thing.”
—Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes
The more we do, the more we can do.
—William Hazlitt
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
—H.P. Lovecraft
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
—Jerome K. Jerome
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
—Samuel Johnson