Work quotes

Words about effort, craft and what we do with our days.

• There is so much to be done in aviation and so much fun to be got from it, that I had become increasingly involved before the flight of the Friendship.

• Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe.

• After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.

• The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer all know that their success depends upon their own industry and economy, and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil. Yet these classes of society form the great body of the people of the United States; they are the bone and sinew of the country--men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws...

• Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.

• Sloth, like Rust, consumes faster than Labour wears, while the used Key is always bright.

• …dost thou love Life, then do not squander Time, for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.

• Well done is better than well said.

• Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.

• I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

• The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary.

• Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.

• It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.

• I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

• There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

• To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

• Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

• …the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

• Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.