Work Quotes (25)

...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.
letter cit. R. Pearson (1914-1930) in The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton
See also:  |  Intellect (21)

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
Martin H. Fischer, Howard Fabing (ed.) and Ray Marr (ed.), Fischerisms (1944).
See also:  |  Physician (123)

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.
from her lecture notes
See also:  |  Biography (132)  |  Chemistry (63)  |  Women Scientists (8)

Here's good advice for practice: go into partnership with nature; she does more than half the work and asks none of the fee.
Martin H. Fischer, Howard Fabing (ed.) and Ray Marr (ed.), Fischerisms (1944).
See also:  |  Money (49)  |  Nature (156)  |  Treatment (22)

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.
Letter to Oskar Pfister, 3 Jun 1910. Quoted in H. Meng and E. Freud (eds.), Psycho-Analysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister (1963), 146.
See also:  |  Autobiography (30)

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.
See also:  |  Achievement (28)  |  Luck (11)

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

If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.
Quoted in National Academy of Engineering, Memorial Tributes (1979), 123.

In the end, poverty, putridity and pestilence; work, wealth and worry; health, happiness and hell, all simmer down into village problems.
See also:  |  Happiness (15)  |  Health (48)  |  Hell (2)  |  Money (49)  |  Pestilence (2)  |  Poverty (5)  |  Problem (30)

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.
From her lecture notes.
See also:  |  Biography (132)  |  Disease (95)

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.'
J. R. Gladstone, Michael Faraday (1872), 122.
See also:  |  Publication (43)  |  Success (21)

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
Attributed.
See also:  |  Machine (12)

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

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?
See also:  |  Ethics (13)  |  Obesity (3)

Research is the name given the crystal formed when the night's worry is added to the day's sweat.
See also:  |  Research (155)  |  Worry (2)

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.
'On Matter, Living Force, and Heat' (1847). In The Scientific Papers of James Prescott Joule (1884), Vol. 1, 271.
See also:  |  Animal (31)  |  Machine (12)  |  Steam Engine (11)

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.
See also:  |  Future (13)

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.

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.
Letter to William Lubbock, 6 Dec 1833. In Frank A. J. L. James (ed.), The Correspondence of Michael Faraday (1993), Vol. 2, 160.
See also:  |  Committee (2)

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.
In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

Working is beautiful and rewarding, but acquisition of wealth for its own sake is disgusting.
A comment Bunsen often told his students.
Quoted in R. Desper, The Human Side of Scientists (1975), 28.
See also:  |  Reward (5)  |  Wealth (4)

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Original words on great scientific discoveries.
Darwin considers pros and cons of marriage.
James Clerk Maxwell's electric but poetic Valentine.
I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy. --Albert Einstein
I try to identify myself with the atoms...I ask what I would do if I were a carbon atom or a sodium atom. --Linus Pauling




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