...I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference.

Ihre Arbeit ist gekrönt worden mit dem Nobel Preis für Otto Hahn.
Her work has been crowned by the Nobel Prize for Otto Hahn.

A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work.

A doctor must work eighteen hours a day and seven days a week. If you cannot console yourself to this, get out of the profession

Arts and sciences in one and the same century have arrived at great perfection; and no wonder, since every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies; the work then, being pushed on by many hands, must go forward.

Don't be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don't let others discourage you or tell you that you can't do it. In my day I was told women didn't go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn't.

During Alfvén's visit he gave a lecture at the University of Chicago, which was attended by [Enrico] Fermi. As Alfvén described his work, Fermi nodded his head and said, 'Of course.' The next day the entire world of physics said. 'Oh, of course.'

Here's good advice for practice: go into partnership with nature; she does more than half the work and asks none of the fee.

I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.

I feel sorry for the person who can't get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile.

I find I'm luckier when I work harder.

I have destroyed almost the whole race of frogs, which does not happen in that savage Batrachomyomachia of Homer. For in the anatomy of frogs, which, by favour of my very excellent colleague D. Carolo Fracassato, I had set on foot in order to become more certain about the membranous substance of the lungs, it happened to me to see such things that not undeservedly 1 can better make use of that (saying) of Homer for the present matter—
'I see with my eyes a work trusty and great.'
For in this (frog anatomy) owing to the simplicity of the structure, and the almost complete transparency of the vessels which admits the eye into the interior, things are more clearly shown so that they will bring the light to other more obscure matters.

I think work is a privilege. ... It keeps you alive, spiritually.

If a train station is where the train stops, what is a work station?

If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.

In the end, poverty, putridity and pestilence; work, wealth and worry; health, happiness and hell, all simmer down into village problems.

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three categories—those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose

It is important to go into work you would like to do. Then it doesn't seem like work. You sometimes feel it's almost too good to be true that someone will pay you for enjoying yourself. I've been very fortunate that my work led to useful drugs for a variety of serious illnesses. The thrill of seeing people get well who might otherwise have died of diseases like leukemia, kidney failure, and herpes virus encephalitis cannot be described in words.

It is on record that when a young aspirant asked Faraday the secret of his success as a scientific investigator, he replied, 'The secret is comprised in three words— Work, Finish, Publish.'

It may sound like a lot of work to keep up with organic chemistry, and it is; however, those who haven't the time to do it become subject to decay in the ability to teach and to contribute to the Science—a sort of first-order process the half-life of which can't be much more than a year or two.

Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.

No sense being pessimistic, it probably wouldn't work anyway.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

One should guard against preaching to the young man success in the customary sense as the aim in life. ... The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.

Our moral theorists seem never content with the normal. Why must it always be a contest between fornication, obesity and laziness, and celibacy, fasting and hard labor?

Research is the name given the crystal formed when the night's worry is added to the day's sweat.

The animal frame, though destined to fulfill so many other ends, is as a machine more perfect than the best contrived steam-engine—that is, is capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel.

The Big Idea that had been developed in the seventeenth century ... is now known as the scientific method. It says that the way to proceed when investigating how the world works is to first carry out experiments and/or make observations of the natural world. Then, develop hypotheses to explain these observations, and (crucially) use the hypothesis to make predictions about the future outcome of future experiments and/or observations. After comparing the results of those new observations with the predictions of the hypotheses, discard those hypotheses which make false predictions, and retain (at least, for the time being) any hypothesis that makes accurate predictions, elevating it to the status of a theory. Note that a theory can never be proved right. The best that can be said is that it has passed all the tests applied so far.

The Johns Hopkins University certifies that John Wentworth Doe does not know anything but Biochemistry. Please pay no attention to any pronouncements he may make on any other subject, particularly when he joins with others of his kind to save the world from something or other. However, he worked hard for this degree and is potentially a most valuable citizen. Please treat him kindly.
[An imaginary academic diploma reworded to give a more realistic view of the value of the training of scientists.]

The lives of scientists, considered as Lives, almost always make dull reading. For one thing, the careers of the famous and the merely ordinary fall into much the same pattern, give or take an honorary degree or two, or (in European countries) an honorific order. It could be hardly otherwise. Academics can only seldom lead lives that are spacious or exciting in a worldly sense. They need laboratories or libraries and the company of other academics. Their work is in no way made deeper or more cogent by privation, distress or worldly buffetings. Their private lives may be unhappy, strangely mixed up or comic, but not in ways that tell us anything special about the nature or direction of their work. Academics lie outside the devastation area of the literary convention according to which the lives of artists and men of letters are intrinsically interesting, a source of cultural insight in themselves. If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility; if a historian were to fail (as Ruskin did) to consummate his marriage, we should not suppose that our understanding of historical scholarship had somehow been enriched.

The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.

The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be no appreciable toil in the world.

To me every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

We often hear of people breaking down from overwork, but in nine out of ten they are really suffering from worry or anxiety.

We work day after day, not to finish things; but to make the future better ... because we will spend the rest of our lives there.

Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.

Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? ... The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.'

With respect to Committees as you would perceive I am very jealous of their formation. I mean working committees. I think business is always better done by few than by many. I think also the working few ought not to be embaras[s]ed by the idle many and further I think the idle many ought not to be honoured by association with: the working few.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

Working is beautiful and rewarding, but acquisition of wealth for its own sake is disgusting.
A comment Bunsen often told his students.

You may say organize, organize, organize; but there may be so much organization that it will interfere with the work to be done.