There's a stereotype that black people are lazy. I don't know if that's true, but I know white people went all the way to Africa to get out of doing work.
—Lance Crouther
You have to surrender to the fact that you are of too many in a highly competitive field where it is difficult to stand out. Over time, through your work, you will demonstrate who you are and what you bring to the field. Just stay with it and keep working.
—Lisa Kudrow
There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
—André Gide
The only way to enjoy anything in this life is to earn it first.
—Ginger Rogers
Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon envy and avarice.
—Dorothy L. Sayers
It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill—it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.
—Vincent Van Gogh
There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.
—Georges Clemenceau
The paths by which people journey toward happiness lie in part through the world about them and in part through the experience of their souls. On the one hand, there is the happiness which comes from wealth, honor, the enjoyment of life, from health, culture, science, or art; and, on the other hand, there is the happiness which is to be found in a good conscience, in virtue, work, philanthropy, religion, devotion to great ideas and great deeds.
—Carl Hilty in Happiness: Essays on the Meaning of Life
The most effective instrument to overcome one's laziness in work is the force of habit.
—Carl Hilty
The important thing is that when you come to understand something, you act on it, no matter how small that act is. Eventually it will take you where you need to go.
—Sister Helen Prejean
Well begun is half done.
—Aristotle
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
—Ronald Reagan
A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The only reason I made a commercial for American Express was to pay for my American Express bill.
—Peter Ustinov
How many scholars are there whose single book or article has generated more intellectual energy than the collected works of other, quantitatively far more 'productive,' scholars? The commensurating device known as the 'tape measure' may tell us that a Vermeer interior and a cow plop are both twenty inches across; there, however, the similarity ends.
—James C. Scott in Two Cheers for Anarchism