work
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘work’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.” -Arthur Schopenhauer
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“The way to work with a bully is to take the ball and go home. First time, every time. When there’s no ball, there’s no game. Bullies hate that. So they’ll either behave so they can play with you or they’ll go bully someone else.” -Seth Godin
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“I am totally against the idea that a Muslim woman should not have the same opportunities as a Muslim man to learn, to open up, to work, help shape the future. To close Islam down to a sexist approach is totally intolerable and ridiculous. It’s not Islam.” -King Hussein I
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“Having a second chance makes you want to work even harder.” -Tia Mowry
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“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” -Anne Lamott
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“The best work is not what is most difficult for you it is what you do best.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
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“Anyone’s life truly lived consists of work, sunshine, exercise, soap, plenty of fresh air, and a happy contented spirit.” -Lillie Langtry
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“I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.” -H. P. Lovecraft
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“The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“God has a plan for all of us, but He expects us to do our share of the work.” -Minnie Pearl
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“Work and live to serve others, to leave the world a little better than you found it and garner for yourself as much peace of mind as you can. This is happiness.” -David Sarnoff
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“One must work and dare if one really wants to live.” -Vincent Van Gogh
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“Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.” -Frederick Douglass
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“Many believe – and I believe – that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.” -Michelangelo
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“Though nature be ever so generous, yet can she not make a hero alone. Fortune must contribute her part too and till both concur, the work cannot be perfected.” -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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“Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating.” -Denis Waitley
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“Never follow somebody else’s path it doesn’t work the same way twice for anyone… the path follows you and rolls up behind you as you walk, forcing the next person to find their own way.” -J. Michael Straczynski
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“It ain’t easy to break out of a mold, but if you do your work, people will ultimately see what you’re capable of. Too often, people find it easier to make assumptions and stick with what they believe. They put you in a place and it makes their job easier. The good people constantly search…
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“It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.” -W. Somerset Maugham
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“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” -Emile Zola
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“The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work.” -Agha Hasan Abedi
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“Look I eat really well and I work out, but I also indulge when I want to. I don’t starve myself in an extremist way. You’re not taking away my coffee or my dairy or my glass of wine because I’d be devastated.” -Jennifer Aniston
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“The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.” -George Eliot
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“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” -Peter Drucker
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“The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.” -Milton Friedman
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“You have not found your place until all your faculties are roused, and your whole nature consents and approves of the work you are doing.” -Orison Swett Marden
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“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” -Salman Rushdie
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“Obviously, I come from one background, and the people that design fitness equipment have been doing it for years and years, and they know what works and doesn’t work.” -Lance Armstrong
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“When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.” -Maxim Gorky
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“God continues to work miracles in my life.” -Willie Aames
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“A person however learned and qualified in his life’s work in whom gratitude is absent, is devoid of that beauty of character which makes personality fragrant.” -Hazrat Inayat Khan
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“I’ve got a theory that if you give 100% all of the time, somehow things will work out in the end.” -Larry Bird
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“I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words.” -Albert Schweitzer
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“Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying… Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.” -Ivan Illich
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“Do not wait the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” -George Herbert
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“I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.” -Rose Kennedy
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“The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.” -Thomas Merton
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“There’s a lot of bitterness, there’s a lot of anger out there. We all have to work hard to heal those wounds.” -Allen Boyd
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“I like Cinderella, I really do. She has a good work ethic. I appreciate a good, hard-working gal. And she likes shoes. The fairy tale is all about the shoe at the end, and I’m a big shoe girl.” -Amy Adams
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“Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.” -Leonardo da Vinci
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“A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they’re capable of understanding.” -Steve Prefontaine
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“If you’re working for a good company and you’re happy there, and you’re being compensated accordingly, and your work satisfies you, you should stay there.” -Robert Kiyosaki
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“Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work.” -H. L. Hunt
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“When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower
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“Work hard, stay positive, and get up early. It’s the best part of the day.” -George Allen, Sr.
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“What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.” -Pearl Bailey
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“A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.” -W. E. B. Du Bois
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“Establishing lasting peace is the work of education all politics can do is keep us out of war.” -Maria Montessori
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“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.” -Marcel Proust
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“In order to excel, you must be completely dedicated to your chosen sport. You must also be prepared to work hard and be willing to accept constructive criticism. Without one-hundred percent dedication, you won’t be able to do this.” -Willie Mays
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“What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!” -Charles Darwin
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“A good boss makes his men realize they have more ability than they think they have so that they consistently do better work than they thought they could.” -Charles Erwin Wilson
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“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen
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“When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.” -W. Clement Stone
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“A treatment method or an educational method that will work for one child may not work for another child. The one common denominator for all of the young children is that early intervention does work, and it seems to improve the prognosis.” -Temple Grandin
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“The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.” -Thomas Carlyle
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“Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.” -Brian Tracy
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“People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.” -Thomas Sowell
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“But I work harder now because I have so much more exposure. And actually the harder you work as a writer, the better you get at it. It’s like anything else. It’s a muscle you have to exercise. I write more now than ever.” -Ron White
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“The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.” -Hillary Clinton
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“Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.” -Helen Hayes
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“I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.” -Orson Welles
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“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.” -Stanislaw Lec
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“Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.” -Edmund Burke
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“There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them!” -Richard P. Feynman
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“Be prepared, work hard, and hope for a little luck. Recognize that the harder you work and the better prepared you are, the more luck you might have.” -Ed Bradley
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“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 be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.” -Louisa May Alcott
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“I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.” -Chuck Palahniuk
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“If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.” -Nhat Hanh
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“As much as I would love to be a person that goes to parties and has a couple of drinks and has a nice time, that doesn’t work for me. I’d just rather sit at home and read, or go out to dinner with someone, or talk to someone I love, or talk to somebody…
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“Musicians can run this state better than politicians. We won’t get a lot done in the mornings, but we’ll work late and be honest.” -Kinky Friedman
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“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.” -Salvador Dali
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“You don’t have to turn on the TV set. You don’t have to work on the Internet. It’s up to you.” -Ray Bradbury
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“To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.” -Leo Tolstoy
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“Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.” -James A. Baldwin
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“I do not believe in excuses. I believe in hard work as the prime solvent of life’s problems.” -James Cash Penney
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“Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.’” -Max Planck
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“If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.” -Richard Dawkins
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“Nothing is void of God, his work is everywhere his full of himself.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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“To make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.” -Louis L’Amour
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“Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.” -Carl Jung
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“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.” -T. S. Eliot
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“I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.” -Lucille Ball
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“Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.” -Aldous Huxley
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“I’d like to believe that the people that have supported me in my work or identified with me in films, the people that feel they know me, they do and they don’t have misconceptions – they understand. I believe that.” -Angelina Jolie
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“Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.” -William James
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“I’m not interested in trying to work on people’s perceptions. I am who I am, and if you don’t take the time to learn about that, then your perception is going to be your problem.” -Jim Brown
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“It takes a lot of energy to be negative. You have to work at it. But smiling is painless. I’d rather spend my energy smiling.” -Eric Davis
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“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” -Woody Allen
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“Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.” -Florence Scovel Shinn
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“Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today. Go another mile!” -Og Mandino
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“One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.” -Victor Hugo
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“If you’re interested in ‘balancing’ work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.” -Donald Trump
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“Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.” -Marquis de Sade
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“I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.” -Thomas A. Edison
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“To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.” -Pablo Picasso
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“Put two or three men in positions of conflicting authority. This will force them to work at loggerheads, allowing you to be the ultimate arbiter.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.” -Bertrand Russell
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“I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.” -Alexander Hamilton
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“I have no idols. I admire work, dedication and competence.” -Ayrton Senna
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“It’s hard to do it because you gotta look people in the eye and tell ’em they’re irresponsible and lazy. And who’s gonna wanna do that? Because that’s what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period.” -Bill O’Reilly
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“I think what makes our marriage work amid all the glare is that my husband is my best friend. He inspires everything in my life and enables me to do the best that I can. I want to hang out with him more than anyone.” -Faith Hill
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“An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.” -Paul Valery
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“People are not perfect… very often the relationships that are strongest are those where people have worked through big crises, but they’ve had to work through them. So the challenge to us is to work through that.” -Patricia Hewitt
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“Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.” -Margaret Thatcher
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“Love and work… work and love, that’s all there is.” -Sigmund Freud
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“Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
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“Our nation is too different, too diverse to say that what works in Massachusetts is somehow going to be grabbed by the federal government, usurping the power of states and imposing a one-size-fits-all plan on the nation. That will not work.” -Mitt Romney
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“Gentleness doesn’t get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs.” -Coco Chanel
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“If you cannot work on the marriage or the women is a moron, staying married and cheating makes the most sense because divorce is disruptive to the family life and your bank account.” -Al Goldstein
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“Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.” -H. L. Mencken
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“For every two minutes of glamour, there are eight hours of hard work.” -Jessica Savitch
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“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.” -Fred Rogers
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“Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.” -Frank Zappa
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“It’s not the work which kills people, it’s the worry. It’s not the revolution that destroys machinery it’s the friction.” -Henry Ward Beecher
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“If there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, good. If there is ferment, so much the better. If there is restlessness, I am pleased. Then let there be ideas, and hard thought, and hard work. If man feels small, let man make himself bigger.” -Hubert H. Humphrey
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“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.” -Richard Bach
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“You do the work and you want people to see it but, um while I’m doing the work, the result doesn’t matter at all to me. Ultimately, I don’t, I don’t care whether the film is – you know – some big giant box-office bonanza and I don’t care if its a complete flop. To…
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“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.” -Walt Disney
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“On Sundays when I speak, I hopefully give somebody something that they can use the next day at work or at home.” -Joel Osteen
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“The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.” -Paul Hawken
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“Begin – to begin is half the work, let half still remain again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.” -Marcus Aurelius
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“I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn’t park anywhere near the place.” -Steven Wright
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“Not only is women’s work never done, the definition keeps changing.” -Bill Copeland
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“Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds.” -Gordon B. Hinckley
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“Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.” -Voltaire
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“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence they go stark, raving mad.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.” -Thomas J. Watson
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“As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.” -Katharine Hepburn
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“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
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“Young people are threatened… by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.” -Pope John Paul II
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“Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.” -Conan O’Brien
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“I have so much chaos in my life, it’s become normal. You become used to it. You have to just relax, calm down, take a deep breath and try to see how you can make things work rather than complain about how they’re wrong.” -Tom Welling
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“If my kid couldn’t draw I’d make sure that my kitchen magnets didn’t work.” -Mitch Hedberg
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“Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.” -Abdul Kalam
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“I love my family very much. I wish I could see them a little more often than I do. But we understand because we’re a show business family and we all work.” -Michael Jackson
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“Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.” -Napoleon Hill
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“If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.” -Ernest Hemingway
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“If you start by promising what you don’t even have yet, you’ll lose your desire to work towards getting it.” -Paulo Coelho
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“Lazy people tend not to take chances, but express themselves by tearing down other’s work.” -Ann Rule
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“Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe.” -Gail Devers
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“For disappearing acts, it’s hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.” -Doug Larson
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“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.” -Arthur Conan Doyle
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“Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious. I would say, if you look at the body of his work, the character he is most like is the one in ‘The Fugitive.’ That’s how he talks and jokes. That is the type of energy he has.” -Will Smith
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“Change yourself and your work will seem different.” -Norman Vincent Peale
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“Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.” -Will Rogers
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“I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident they came by work.” -Plato
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“The greatest humiliation in life, is to work hard on something from which you expect great appreciation, and then fail to get it.” -E. W. Howe
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“Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don’t complain.” -Billy Graham
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“I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.” -Bob Dylan
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“What I know is, is that if you do work that you love, and the work fulfills you, the rest will come.” -Oprah Winfrey
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“I learned the value of hard work by working hard.” -Margaret Mead
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“Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” -Theodore Roosevelt
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“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.” -Steve Jobs
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“My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group there was much less competition.” -Indira Gandhi
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“If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.” -Dale Carnegie
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“One and one is two, and two and two is four, and five will get you ten if you know how to work it.” -Mae West
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“Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” -Stephen King
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“Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.” -John Carmack
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“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” -Alexander Graham Bell
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“No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don’t knock your friends. Don’t knock your enemies. Don’t knock yourself.” -Alfred Lord Tennyson
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“Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.” -Ayn Rand
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“It’s said in Hollywood that you should always forgive your enemies – because you never know when you’ll have to work with them.” -Lana Turner
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“When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I’m sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.” -George Carlin
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“A relationship requires a lot of work and commitment.” -Greta Scacchi
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“No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” -Alan Watts
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“Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.” -Erma Bombeck
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“People say you have to work on your resentments. Yeah, no, I’m gonna hang onto them and they’re gonna fuel my attack.” -Charlie Sheen
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“Any man today who returns from work, sinks into a chair, and calls for his pipe is a man with an appetite for danger.” -Bill Cosby
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“The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism it’s egotism.” -Robert Frost
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“If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?” -Henry David Thoreau
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“Once you start a working on something, don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.” -Chanakya
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