Motivational quotes for work come in handy when you are feeling uninspired or encountering a challenging stretch.
You work hard to achieve your goals, but sometimes the pressure can be overwhelming. These uplifting and inspiring words help you to stay on track and keep going when things get tough.
Best Motivational Quotes for Work
Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them.
Vaibhav Shah
I don’t like work–no man does–but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself not, for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show and never can tell what it really means.
Joseph Conrad
All progress takes place outside the comfort zone.
Michael John Bobak
Don’t count the days, make the days count.
Muhammad Ali
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Pablo Picasso
If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you!
T. Harv Eker
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Émile Zola
Inspiring Work Quotes
When someone tells me ‘no,’ it doesn’t mean I can’t do it; it simply means I can’t do it with them.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
Coco Chanel
The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.
Barack Obama
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
Kurt Vonnegut
Do not whine. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone
Joan Didion
Good things come to people who wait, but better things come to those who go out and get them.
Unknown
Good Motivational Quotes for Work
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
Alan Watts
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing–that’s why we recommend it daily.
Zig Ziglar
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt
No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
Martin Luther King Jr.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Steve Jobs
I believe that the only courage anybody ever needs is the courage to follow your own dreams.
Oprah Winfrey
You may only succeed if you desire succeeding; you may only fail if you do not mind failing.
Philippos
People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
Frederick Douglass
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Bill Gates
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.
John Wooden
Short Motivational Quotes for Work
Opportunities don’t happen; you create them.
Chris Grosser
Light tomorrow with today.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Work without love is slavery.
Mother Teresa
You should not confuse your career with your life.
Dave Barry
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.
Dale Carnegie
Make each day your masterpiece.
John Wooden
Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it.
Buddha
Our labour preserves us from three great evils — weariness, vice, and want.
Voltaire
Don’t mistake activity with achievement.
John Wooden
Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs.
Farrah Gray
Fall 7 times, stand up 8.
Japanese Proverb
Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.
Leonardo da Vinci
Someday is not a day of the week.
Janet Dailey
A year from now, you may wish you had started today.
Karen Lamb
All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney — See 100 Best Walt Disney Sayings.
Funny Motivational Quotes for Work
I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.
Charles Lamb
If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.
Terry Pratchett
We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas A. Edison
I’ve come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power.
Jason Mraz
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
J.M. Barrie
Apparently, I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking.
John Kennedy Toole
I’ve heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance?
Ronald Reagan
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome
Amusing Insights
I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
Emile Zola
We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter, but work is third.
Leslie Knope
A person who has not done one half of his day’s work by ten o’clock runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.
Emily Bronte
Inspirational Motivational Quotations
A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.
David Brinkley
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life–think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
Swami Vivekananda
If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
Plato
Get going. Move forward. Aim High. Plan a takeoff. Don’t just sit on the runway and hope someone will come along and push the airplane. It simply won’t happen. Change your attitude and gain some altitude. Believe me, you’ll love it up here.
Donald Trump
If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
Thomas J. Watson
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal. Nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong attitude.
Thomas Jefferson
I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.
Amelia Earhart
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
Alan Turing
The starting point of all achievement is desire.
Napoleon Hill
We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret.
Earl Nightingale
Dreams mean work.
Paulo Coelho
If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Daily Motivational Quotes for Work
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
Aristotle
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Thomas Jefferson
All happiness depends on courage and work.
Honoré de Balzac
The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.
Richard Bach
People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tony Robbins
Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out.
Robert Collier
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
Maya Angelou
Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds.
Gordon B. Hinckley
If you care about what you do and work hard at it, there isn’t anything you can’t do if you want to.
Jim Henson
Galvanizing Quotes
You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.
George Lorimer
Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.
Louisa May Alcott
Successful entrepreneurs are givers and not takers of positive energy.
Unknown
Masanobu Fukuoka Quotation
I do not particularly like the word’ work.’ Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive.
The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time.
I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life.
For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Motivational Quotes for Working Hard
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
Thomas A. Edison
Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Be like a duck, paddling and working very hard inside the water, but what everyone sees is a smiling and calm face.
Manoj Arora
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
Dale Carnegie
No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
Theodore Roosevelt
The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.
Vidal Sassoon
Hide not your talents, they for use were made, What’s a sundial in the shade?
Benjamin Franklin
The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
Jimmy Johnson
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
William James
Working Hard For Success Quotes
Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work, one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Steve Jobs
The individual who says it is not possible should move out of the way of those doing it.
Tricia Cunningham
Spending time with God is the key to our strength and success in all areas of life. Be sure that you never try to work God into your schedule, but always work your schedule around Him.
Joyce Meyer
Even though your time on the job is temporary, if you do a good enough job, your work there will last forever.
Idowu Koyenikan
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
Bruce Lee
The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.
Steve Jobs
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
Bruce Feirstein
There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.
Ray Goforth
If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents–start charging for it.
Kim Garst
Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
Powerful Motivational Quotes for Work
Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.
Albert Einstein
The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.
Phil Jackson
These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.
Anthony de Mello
In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.
Tina Fey
There is no traffic jam along the extra mile.
Roger Staubach
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man’s true worth.
Criss Jami
When you stop chasing the wrong things, you give the right things a chance to catch you.
Lolly Daskal
I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing.
Martha Stewart
The more your money works for you, the less you have to work for money.
Idowu Koyenikan
When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play at all.
Theodore Roosevelt
Relatable Motivational Quotes for Work
The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.
George Carlin
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.
Dave Barry
When he worked, he really worked. But when he played, he really PLAYED.
Dr. Seuss
When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.
Idowu Koyenikan
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.
Colin R. Davis
Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.
Anne Frank
I don’t really like coffee, she said, but I don’t really like it when my head hits my desk when I fall asleep either.
Brian Andreas
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
Victor Hugo
Deep Motivational Quotes for work
These motivational quotes for work come from an intellectual perspective.
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, he turned into a butterfly.
Proverb
Jobs are a part of life. Maybe you’ve heard of the concept. It’s called work? See, what happens is that you suffer through doing annoying and humiliating things until you get paid not enough money. Like those Japanese game shows, only without all the glory.
Jim Butcher
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.
Harry S. Truman
Compelling Quotations on Work
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish. You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de Beauvoir
We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got.
Unknown
Motivational Quotes for Work Creativity
If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.
Jim Rohn
Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.
Les Brown
We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.
Ariana Huffington
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.
Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.
Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Chuck Close
Working Hard Quotations
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.
Madeleine L’Engle
The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.
Mark Caine
The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
Steven Pressfield
If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
Jim Rohn
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.
Peter Drucker
Motivational Captions for Work
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
If you worked hard, then everything will be fine.
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
All great things in life are hard to achieve, and if you shy away from hard work and challenges, you’ll miss out.
Overworking is the Black Plague of the 21st Century.
They told me I’d never get that far. They were right, I got even further.
Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment.
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.
Barking hard work, being a boy.
Instagram Captions
Hard things are put in our way, not to stop us, but to call out our courage and strength.
Sometimes there’s no better way. Sometimes there’s only the hard way.
Everything you need is already inside you, Get started.
All good work requires self-revelation.
Your problem isn’t the problem. Your reaction is the problem.
Even a low class warrior can surpass an elite, with enough hard work.
Hard work is the best talent that I know, strangely, it works in all the fields of human endeavor.
If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission.
Genius is 10% talent and 90% hard work.
You can do anything, but not everything.
Men die of boredom, psychological conflict and disease. They do not die of hard work.
No matter how hard you work, someone else is working harder.
Inspiration works if you work.
The sweet smell of success comes on the back of the stench of hard-earned sweat.
Hard Work; Not Hardly Working
Do all the work you can, while there is the grace of strength.
Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success.
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
Many a man wants glory but fails to work.
Every failure makes me work twice as hard as me giving up.
Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
When you truly love what you do, not working is hard work.
Hard work isn’t a punishment; it’s a gift.
Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.
The wise rest at least as hard as they work.
Hard work is even more pleasing in the rich, whereas laziness is even more disgusting in the poor.
No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.
There are no seasons of life that don’t require hard work and determination to accomplish something great.
I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
What’s the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
By Molly Towle
Molly writes about business, motivation, and philosophy.
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