Hard Work quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside hard work — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Don't get caught up in how many hours you work. Judge success based on having goals and measuring your results. Hard work, and lots of it, is certainly needed, but focus on what you get done."
"You think you're prepared. You think you've done everything you're supposed to, study hard, work hard, keep yourself out of trouble, and then-whoosh! Something arrives out of the blue that you never saw coming. Something you never even imagined. Something that'll knock your little world off its axis. Something that'll either change your life for the better, or end it forever. Chaos."
"I'm a guy who has always been a late bloomer on every level. I've always wanted to get into the league as a kid. Who would have thought during my senior year at college that I would be where I am now? It's been a lot of hard work and never stopping."
"Youths write me and tell me that their band will go nowhere because of all the bad bands in the world. I tell them there has always been awful music and that no great band ever wasted any time complaining, they just got it done. Their ropey ranting is just a way to get out of the hard work of making music that will do some lasting damage."
"Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it."
"Knighterrantry is a most chuckleheaded trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there is money in it, after all, if you have luck. Not that I would ever engage in it, as a business, for I wouldn't. No sound and legitimate business can be established on a basis of speculation. A successful whirl in the knighterrantry line--now what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It's just a corner in pork, that's all."
"For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen."
"You've got to work hard for your success and you've got to have a steady presence. That's the secret."
"I'm a southern girl from Arkansas and I am just tryin to do my thing in the business. To make a long story short I'm just trying to be successful at what I do and work hard."
"You should be dead," he said, his voice full of wonder. "How is it that you're still alive?" Jaw clenched, I worked at his grip on me, trying to get my fingers between him and my wrist. "I work hard at it."
"If you work hard and be persistent, you will achieve whatever you want to do."
"Just remember--if you are really and truly determined to work with animals, somehow, either now or later, you will find a way to do it. But you have to want it desperately, work hard, take advantage of an opportunity--and never give up."
"It depends what competition you are in. When you go to the big meets it's all about who touches in first. You've got to get into that race and into that frame of mind so that you're ready to race and you're ready to work hard and finish first."
"When you think about your heritage, you think about toughness and hard work."
"It's got too much hard work slapping them and telling them to shut up."
"Historically, opportunity has been afforded to a limited pool of people, excluding people of color and women. That doesn't diminish the talent or hard work of the people within that pool, but it does narrow the field of stories that have been told, and of the creative ideas and perspectives out there."
"The works of Lavoisier and his associates operated upon many of us at that time like the Sun's rising after a night of moonshine: but Chemistry is now betrothed to the Mathematics, and is in consequence grown somewhat shy of her former admirers."
"A fallow field is a sin."
"I'm not really that hard-working. We've hung out a lot, and you know that I don't work harder than you. Everyone else is just really lazy. People do half a thing, and then they just go out to lunch."
"I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking."
