If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
—Vince Lombardi
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration.
—Igor Stravinsky
What you have to do now is work. There's no right way to start.
—Anna Held Audette
Excuse me, sir; I cannot consent to receive pay for services I do not render.
—Robert E. Lee, explaining his rejection of a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year salary to act as titular head of an insurance company after the Civil War
There are no easy methods of learning difficult things; the method is to close your door, give out that you are not at home, and work.
—Joseph de Maistre
When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
—George Bernard Shaw
I have not failed. I have found ten thousand ways that won't work.
—Thomas Edison
Envy is a con man, a tugger at your sleeve, a knocker at your door. Let me in for just a moment, it says, for just one moment of your time.… The antidote to envy is one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself. It drives the spooks away.
—Bonita Freedman
The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Nobody's lives just fit together. Fitting together is something you work at. It's something you make happen—because you love each other.
—Rainbow Rowell in Landline
This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can't put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing that you can do: you take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. Two things, not all things! That's the way the work has to go. You make connections in your work… That's what we do, we people who make things. If it's a stool or a film or a poem or an essay or a novel or a musical composition, it's all about that. Finding how it fits together and fitting it together.
—Wendell Berry
There's a group of Americans who are fully employed. They aren't very well paid or they're not paid at all. They're called mothers, and I've never heard of a mother who wasn't a working mother. And that includes the mothers on welfare.
—Theresa Funiciello
Nonviolence doesn't always work—but violence never does.
—Madge Micheels-Cyrus
The days you work are the best days.
—Georgia O'Keeffe
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
—Ronald Reagan