The Best Quotes About Hard Work
I've collected thousands of quotes over the past 10+ years.
Here are the best ones I've found so far about hard work...
“I will prepare and some day my chance will come.” -Abraham Lincoln
“Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.” -Roald Amundsen
"If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?" -T.S. Eliot
“People don’t reach their potential on accident. The secret to success can be found in people’s daily agendas.” -John Maxwell
"Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life." -Jerzy Gregorek
“Let us run the risk of wearing out rather than rusting out.” -Teddy Roosevelt
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On!' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” -Calvin Coolidge
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“I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.” -Will Smith
“Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.” -Louis Pasteur
”We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” -Aristotle
"I'm convinced that about half of what separates the most successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance." -Steve Jobs
“Everyone who strives to reach his potential must pay a price—in time, effort, resources, and opportunities missed. Many people fail to pay the price that their potential demands.” -John Maxwell
“From my experience, the most common trait you will consistently observe in accomplished people is an obsession with completion. Once a project falls into their horizon, they crave almost compulsively, to finish it.” -Cal Newport
"Be very suspicious of shortcuts, in life and in art." -Ryan Holiday
"Champions aren't made in the ring, they are merely recognized there." -Joe Frazier
"Doing the work is what makes you look like an overnight success ten years later." -Kathleen Shannon and Emily Thompson
“Luck is a word people who are lazy use to describe people who are hustling.” -Jon Acuff
"Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." -Robert Louis Stevenson (attributed)
"Far and away, the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." -Teddy Roosevelt
"Hard work is a talent because hard work means that you keep going, you keep fighting, you know how not to quit under pressure even if you fail." -Garry Kasparov
“Dreams are lovely but they are dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral, pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.” -Shonda Rhimes
"If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it." -Attributed to multiple pianists, including Franz Liszt and Ignacy Jan Paderewski
"If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all." -Michelangelo
"Everything worthwhile is uphill." -John Maxwell
"All of your dreams are on the other side of pain and difficulty." -Will Smith
"Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this: when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly." -Alexander Hamilton
"Nobody said being great would be easy." -Wayne Gretzky
"The greatest breakthroughs are missed because they look like really hard work." -Kevin Kelly
"The plain fact remains that men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use." -William James
"The more you sweat, the less you bleed." -Idea from General Norman Schwarzkopf
"There are a lot of people out there who are happy to give ten percent, but I don't know any of them. I don't know their names because they don't have any books." -David Sedaris
"There are no easy paths that are also worthwhile." -Joel Primus
“Do not whine...do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” -Joan Didion
"There's no talent here, this is hard work. This is an obsession. Talent does not exist, we are all equal as human beings. You could be anyone if you put in the time. You will reach the top, and that is that. I am not talented, I am obsessed." -Conor McGregor
"Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you." -Mark Cuban
“Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.” -Norman Bushnell
“Ideas are cheap...The difference between a great work and an idea for a great work is all the sweat, time, effort, and agony that go into engaging that idea and turning it into something real. That difference is not trivial. If great work were easy to produce, a lot more people would do it.” -Ryan Holiday
“Lots of people want to be the noun (writer, entrepreneur, etc.) without doing the verb (writing, inventing, etc.).” -Austin Kleon
“The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs…one step at a time.” -Joe Girardi
“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there's two things: You're getting off first, or I'm going to die. It's really that simple, right?” -Will Smith
“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses—behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” -Muhammad Ali
“Write your own part. It is the only way I’ve gotten anywhere. It’s much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands.” -Mindy Kaling
“When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot it really pisses me off. I tell those people, ‘Don’t undermine the work I’ve put in every day.’ Not some days. Every day. Ask anyone who has been on a team with me who shoots the most. Go back to Seattle and Milwaukee, and ask them. The answer is me.” -Ray Allen
“When we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.” -Steven Pressfield
“You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.” -Michael Connelly
“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.” -John Wooden
"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before." -Jacob Riis
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” -Teddy Roosevelt
