Quotes & Sayings About Not Working Hard

Cool it," cried Olga. "Working hard is what I do! Can't be perfect. Going to school not cheap and what are you doing here, a beauty nobody want. My first year was ok, only five or ten times knocked down, then later more and more. He says I'm no lady and gotta work harder for his dollar. — J.M.K. Walkow

I know I've broken all the rules of all the games, that all the great players and best love calculators recommend that you play, if you want to make someone like you a lot. But that's okay, because I give up. I've got my coffee sitting in my San Francisco cup, I've got Kona island and a working beating heart that's not cold, hard, or numb - very workable and capable of loving, breaking, mending and repeating. So that's just what I'll do. Because I'm too tired. Too tired uping all nighting wasting my precious timing wishing it was your heart pumping, wanting me - like I used to want you. — Coco J. Ginger

A Person spends a whole day, five days a week or more, working hard to make money, but few ever think beyond this fact. They live from pay cheque to pay cheque, drifting through life, and only realize too late that what they have been doing was not wise at all.
As individuals it is now time we take charge of our money and plan for it, otherwise it will plan for you. — Neala Okuromade

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly. — Alice Walker

Mama and I would go to a funeral and she'd stand up to read the dead person's eulogy. She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that made you laugh. — Henry Louis Gates

I do a job and am lucky enough to do a job that I love, but it is a hard one. I'm not saying it is as hard as working in a coal mine, but it is still difficult in a different way. Sometimes you have to go through very strong emotional journeys and then come back to yourself. And that can be difficult to control. — Javier Bardem

The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out. — William James

He's not dead, Parker." He clenched his jaw so hard she could see the muscles working in it.

"Are you just saying that to make me feel better?"

"No, I'm saying it to make myself feel better. — Matt Forbeck

I have been working a lot, and I like it. And you know, it's hard for me not to. I guess I've been working a lot because I get to play with brilliant people. — Charlize Theron

Most illegal immigrants are not by nature lawbreakers. Most are looking for the chance to live in dignity. Nevertheless we must continue to discourage illegal immigration for it undermines control of our borders ... and even more punishes hard-working people who play by the rules and who wait for their turn to come to the United States. Therefore we must enforce our laws, but we will do so with justice and fairness. — William J. Clinton

If you are not working towards something, your life will end with nothing. — Habeeb Akande

Goodnight, Sam."
Sam took a deep breath and tried to settle himself. It did not good, instead he inhaled a hint of her vanilla perfume mixed with the smell of sea salt. He couldn't help himself. His mind drifted. He longed to buy his face in her neck and breathe it in. Instead he made due with taking deep breathes as the spicy aroma engulfed him.
After a while he realized this wasn't working for him, her signature scent stimulated him and forced him to long for her. He tried counting backwards from a hundred. Maybe that would work to level off his arousal so he could get some sleep. Just lying there thinking about her cologne or the fact that he could simply reach out and touch her body was enough to keep him hard all night. And frustrated...ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three. — Carolyn Gibbs

Your cells are not working as hard as your dog's but harder than your horse's. The bigger the animal, the less energy needed to sustain a gram of tissue. — Geoffrey West

You can write and visualize goals all you want, but if you do not take action, your goals will never become a reality. To obtain a goal you have never before achieved will require tasks you have never before done. — Cameron C. Taylor

What we have to do is make sure that here in America, if you work hard, you can get ahead. If you worked hard, not only did you have a good job, but you also had decent benefits, decent health care. We've got to make sure that we're doing everything we can to expand the middle class and people who are working hard can get into the middle class. — Barack Obama

Foch never for a moment thought about the easy ways of bringing his name before the public and the political world, or even about acquiring a reputation for military insight among the chiefs of the French army. He never posed as a central figure at public functions; he was never interviewed by the press; he made no use of the professional reviews to bring his name before military readers. Ile never published a line until his chiefs suggested the publication of his lectures at the Staff College. From the day when he received his first commission he was a hard-working student of war, patiently preparing himself to do his duty when the opportunity came, and meanwhile content to put all his energies into the work assigned to him. Success in the career of arms is not always associated with high personal character or with this modest pursuit of duty for its own sake. — Andrew Hilliard Atteridge

I'm not a dieter. I have the palate of a 7-year-old boy, although I'm working on it. I order off the kids' menu! I'm working hard to eat more fruit and veggies and round it all out, but I'm a big pretzels and Diet Coke kind of girl. — Allison Williams

Working hard is very important. You're not going to get anywhere without working extremely hard. — George Lucas

I have felt alone all my life. I was always too smart, or working too hard, or too full of doubt to fit in with everyone else. But when I'm with you, I never feel alone, Will. Never. I feel seen, and I feel listened to, and I feel important and cared for. When I first met you, I told myself I had to be insane to think that someone like you would be interested in someone like me. But it didn't stop me from falling in love with you, because loving you is as easy and as natural as breathing for me. This may shock you, but my love doesn't come with conditions or requirements. It absolutely doesn't require physical exam, that is for sure. It just is, Will. And it's unstoppable, because, believe me, I've tried to stop it. So I guess what I'm trying to say in my usual inarticulate, rambly, too-wordy way, is that I'm not going anywhere. No matter what. — Sarah Mayberry

There are actors who spend 20 years working and still don't achieve what I've achieved so quickly. So I think my only course of action is to work as hard as I can, not just for the sake of the film, but also to prove to these people that I do have talent. — Zhang Ziyi

People need to ask, "How do I play the hand that has been dealt me?" The world is not going to give you extra return just because you want it. You have to be very shrewd and hard working to get a little extra. It's so much easier to reduce your wants. There are a lot of smart people and a lot of them cheat, so it's not easy to win. — Charlie Munger

She expected a lot of me. When I was in fourth grade working on a book report, she made me start the whole thing over when she read it and said it was barely even legible. "What's wrong with it?" I asked her. "It's not good enough yet. You have to try harder," she said, her voice gentle. "You have to try hard at everything you do. That's all I ask." I rolled my eyes and revised it, and over time her approach wore off on me and I became like her too - wanting to do my best, expecting my best. — Daisy Whitney

Mothers always think you are working either too hard or not hard enough. — Peg Bracken

People get themselves all steamed up about weather they're in love or not. They ought to realize that the love part is perfectly easy; the hard part is working out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it. — Kingsley Amis

They are working hard and fast, but they are just doing what they are supposed to do. I see the same look on the faces of some of Max's teachers when Max doesn't understand something and the teacher doesn't think he will ever understand it. The teachers work hard, but you can tell that they are just doing the lesson. Not teaching the lesson. That's what the doctors look like now. They are doing the doctoring but they do not believe in the doctoring. — Matthew Dicks

Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working so hard to distribute Android phones globally that whether you like [Android 4.0] or not ... you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first. — Eric Schmidt

I, too, had set out to be remembered. I had wanted to create something permanent in my life- some proof that everything in its way mattered, that working hard mattered, that feeling things mattered, that even sadness and loss mattered, because it was all part of something that would live on. But I had also come to recognize that not everything needs to be durable. the lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or future is not limiting but liberating. Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy; for him, it was always enough to have that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the beloved rubber doll was squeaked. Such a moment was complete in itself, pure and sufficient. — Susan Orlean

It makes it [work] a lot easier when you like what you do. It's easy when you're working and making money doing it. It's hard when you're not. That's when that gets challenged. — Marc Blucas

They'll get it all from you sooner or later 'cause they own this f**kin' place. It's a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on. — George Carlin

There was not an awareness of pop culture in the household. There was a lot of respect for working hard, and for intellectual and professional achievement. — Sheila Heti

Time has to be converted, then, from chronos, mere chronological time, to kairos, a New Testament Greek word that has to do with opportunity, with moments that seem ripe for their intended purpose. Then, even while life continues to seem harried, while it continues to have hard moments, we say, "Something good is happening amid all this." We get glimpses of how God might be working out his purposes in our days. Time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God's work with us. Whatever happens - good things or bad, pleasant or problematic - we look and ask, "What might God be doing here?" We see the events of the day as continuing occasions to change the heart. Time points to Another and begins to speak to us of God. We — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Yeah," Tamara said. "An old bowling alley. There must be a town not too far from here. But how could Aaron be there? And don't say something like 'working on his score' or 'maybe he's in a bowling league' or something like that. Be serious."
Call leaned against the rough bark of a nearby tree and resisted the urge to sit down. He was afraid he wouldn't be able to get up again. "I'm serious. It might be hard to tell in the dark, but I have my most super-serious face on. — Cassandra Clare

The way I see it, people are working hard. They're working their fingers to the bone. Or am I looking at things wrong?
That's not hard work. It's just manual labour. — Haruki Murakami

We have been working hard to think about what our combined needs are going to be in the way of intelligence capabilities, not today but 15 to 20 years in the future. — Stephen Cambone

Life is not supposed to be easy. Stop working so hard to make it that way. Go ahead and handle it! — Camila Alves

"There is an easy standoff between the two kinds of mother which sometimes makes it hard for us to talk to each other. I suspect that the non-working mother looks at the working mother with envy and fear because she thinks that the working mum has got away with it. And the working mum looks back with fear and envy because she knows that she has not. In order to keep going in either role, you have to convince yourself that the alternative is bad. The working mother says, because I am more fulfilled as a person I can be a better mother to my children. And sometimes, she may even believe it. The mother who stays home knows that she is giving her kids an advantage, which is something to cling to when your toddler has emptied his beaker of juice over you last clean t-shirt. — Allison Pearson

It was a matter of not living lavishly but enjoying what you had, growing things with your hands, working hard, but not being tied to a nine-to-five job, and generally feeling that there's more to life than money. — John Sulston

Guilt isn't in cat vocabulary. They never suffer remorse for eating too much, sleeping too long or hogging the warmest cushion in the house. They welcome every pleasurable moment as it unravels and savour it to the full until a butterfly or falling leaf diverts their attention. They don't waste energy counting the number of calories they've consumed or the hours they've frittered away sunbathing.
Cats don't beat themselves up about not working hard enough. They don't get up and go, they sit down and stay. For them, lethargy is an art form. From their vantage points on top of fences and window ledges, they see the treadmills of human obligations for what they are - a meaningless waste of nap time. — Helen Brown

Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don't need in order to dull the pain of overwork? — Tom Hodgkinson

I'm not saying the Christian life is effortless; the real question is Where are we focusing our efforts? Are we working hard to perform? Or are we working hard to rest in Christ's performance for us? — Tullian Tchividjian

The Coffee Guy, whose name is Rosie by the way, has moved to El Salvador.' I lied.
This was not met with happy noises.
'He's turned his back on coffee and is in the wilds of Central America building houses for the poor. I think we should all take a moment away from our quest for coffee-satisfaction and think about this noble decision. As you clamor for caffeine and curse the hard-working but innocent staff at my store, Rosie is sitting in the bed of a beat-up pickup bumping across roads to make one room homes out of mud for those who have nothing at all — Kristen Ashley

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal. — Edward Abbey

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour [the minimum wage in 1996] are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist. — Tom DeLay

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview] — Ray Bradbury

Simply put, if you are not doubting yourself or not thinking of other things that you could be doing instead of the task at hand, you're probably not working hard enough — Dos Remedios, Robert

This should have been a red flag, I realize in retrospect. Working really hard on anything is, by definition, not cool. — Leila Sales

For me, even if the path isn't clear, I feel much better today waking up and working hard and heading forward in some direction than being at times where I was before when I was just flipping the same switch every single day and not really moving forward. I don't live my life based on a guarantee, because I don't buy it. Anything can happen. A — Tess Vigeland

I believe there need to be women visual in our every day landscape, working hard and doing their own thing, whether you like it or not, whether it's acceptable or not ... I especially hope to inspire young women because often I feel like so much emphasis is put on how beautiful you are, and how thin you are, and not a lot of emphasis is put on what you can do and how smart you are. I'd like to change that, change the emphasis of what's important when looking at a woman. — Margaret Kilgallen

It is hard for me to imagine retiring at 65 and spending the next quarter century not working. I expect to be working, doing something productive and fulfilling. — Marco Rubio

The best dog training was based on the reward system. You did not punish a dog for doing wrong, you rewarded the dog for doing right. The dog did something you wanted, you reinforced the behavior with a reward - pet'm, tell'm they're a good dog, let'm play with a toy. The standard reward for a K-9 working dog was a hard plastic ball with a hole drilled through it where Leland liked to smear a little peanut butter. — Robert Crais

Success is not a destination, but the road that you're on. Being successful means that you're working hard and walking your walk every day. You can only live your dream by working hard towards it. That's living your dream. — Marlon Wayans

Sometimes life will be awesome. Sometimes, life will look blurry. Along the way in the journey of life, sometimes, life will be colder than warmer and sometimes warmer than colder but in all things we must remember that it is never over for a purposeful journey of life until the journey of life is over. Be it rough or smooth, good or bad, we must accomplish the task. It shall always not be good and it shall always not be bad; we only have to work hard. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

If you're not scared when you are writing you're not working hard enough. You'll be afraid but you have to keep going. — M. Molly Backes

In addition to working as hard as men, women and girls were susceptible to sexual exploitation in ways and at rates that did not apply to men (the subject of males as victims of sexual assault has received little scholarly attention, with the exception of lynching and its attendant castration ritual). Absentee owners had to rely on managers and overseers, both white and black, who viewed sexual access as their right. Many enslaved children resulted from these unions; the question of how these interactions should be understood is a matter of debate. The rewards of voluntary cooperation could have included — Michael A. Gomez

Me not working hard? Yeah, right - picture that with a Kodak. — Rob Gronkowski

Happiness does not fall out of the blue and dreams will not come true by themselves. We need to be down-to-earth and work hard. We should uphold the idea that working hard is the most honorable, noblest, greatest and most beautiful virtue. — Xi Jinping

Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. "He doesn't say, 'You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,'" Brogan said. "He says, 'I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?' Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You're working hard for yourself. It's a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work." And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn't have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The — Ashlee Vance

I really like Barack Obama. I think that he's working very hard. He's trying to rebuild our reputation throughout the world. The previous administration was a total disaster, a total catastrophe. He was handed a pretty bad deck of cards. And I'm not saying I agree with everything he's doing. He's a champion. I mean, he won against all odds. When he first announced, people were giving him virtually no chance. And he's just done something that's amazing. — Donald Trump

Having spent all of my teens and my twenties partying hard (very hard) then working the next day, I can assure you that losing bit of sleep to feed the thing you love most in the world is not a chore at all. Since having a baby I am better rested than ever. Sure, I can't party any more but I don't need to. Because I am happy. — James Mullinger

Persevering is not often simply a matter of working hard and refusing to quit; often, by trying again, failing again, and failing better, we inadvertently place ourselves in the way of luck. — Karen Karbo

Support a small chef. Not these big chains ... but support the people who are out there trying to do things right and working hard to do that. — Tom Douglas

I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book. — George Saunders

You have to work hard, and you have to enjoy what you're doing. If you don't enjoy it, no matter how hard you seem to work, you're not going to be working as hard as you can because you're not enjoying it. — John Wooden

Just as he'd done to her, she slowly moved up and down, caressing him with her body, drawing out his response. He ground his teeth together, fighting not to come when she was just as determined he would.
Frustrated, she wondered why he was holding back - until she heard herself moan, and realized the friction was working on her, too.
The battle there in the shower was in close-combat conditions. With the clinging grip of her body she tried to wring a climax from him, locking her legs around him and pumping hard. He slowed her down with that one arm around her hips, grinding her against him and sending her response rocketing. — Linda Howard

Nobody's going to sell 10 million records by not working hard. — Daryl Hall

It's not hard work that wears you out, but the repression of your true personality, and I've found a way of working that does not demand that. — Frances Hesselbein

The most powerful nation on earth should be able to pass a fair, effective immigration law that combines compassion with responsibility and does not injure hard working Americans who are taxed up to here. — Bill O'Reilly

How are you feeling, man?" he asks me.
"Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? "Oh," I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder.
"Stay loose, Frisco," he says. "There's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I'm here."
I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive.
"I'm here," Carlton says again, and he is. — Michael Cunningham

John McCutcheon is not only one of the best musicians in the USA, but also a great singer, songwriter, and song leader. And not just incidentally, he is committed to helping hard-working people everywhere to organize and push this world in a better direction. — Pete Seeger

You must have been working very hard here, with so few distractions."
Mary's eyes darkened and she looked away.
"Not quite as much as I hoped for. At times the loneliness and the unanswered questions can get overwhelming, like very loud voices echoing inside my head, just asking 'why' 'who' and making me think about my wasted life. — Olga Nunez Miret

I drink because I don't stand a chance and I know it. I couldn't drive a truck and I couldn't get on the cops with my build. I got to sling beer and sing when I just want to sing. I drink because I got responsibilities that I can't handle ... I am not a happy man. I got a wife and children and I don't happen to be a hard-working man. I never wanted a family ... Yes, your mother works hard. I love my wife and I love my children. But shouldn't a man have a better life? Maybe someday it will be that the Unions will arrange for a man to work and to have time for himself too. But that won't be in my time. Now, it's work hard all the time or be a bum ... no in-between. When I die, nobody will remember me for long. No one will say, "He was a man who loved his family and believed in the Union." All they will say is," Too bad. But he was nothing but a drunk no matter which way you look at it." Yes they'll say that. — Betty Smith

Buddha says: Life should be simple, not complex. Life should be based on needs, not on desires. Needs are perfectly okay: you need food, you need clothes, you need a shelter, you need love, you need relationship. Perfectly good, nothing wrong in it. Needs can be fulfilled; desires are basically unfulfillable. Desires create complexity. They create complexity because they can never be fulfilled. You go on and on working hard for them, and they remain unfulfilled, and you remain empty. — Rajneesh

People that you thought were your friends give you shit about working hard. All I know is that we play hard and a lot of this shit is not fun. Playing is great but the way we live is not the life of a rockstar. — Henry Rollins

Looking back, if I had to live my life over, there are things I would do differently, but the one thing I would not change is my charitable giving. I'm particularly thankful for my father's advice to set goals so high that they can't possibly be achieved during a lifetime and to give help where help is needed most. That inspiration keeps me energized and eager to keep working hard every day on giving back and making the world a better place for generations to come. — Ted Turner

In the consumer culture of marriage, commitments last as long as the other person is meeting our needs. We still believe in commitment, because we know that committed relationships are good for us, but powerful voices coming from inside and outside tell us that we are suckers if we settle for less than we think we need and deserve in our marriage. Most baby boomers and their offspring carry in our heads the internalized voice of the consumer culture-to encourage us to stop working so hard or to get out of a marriage that is not meeting our current emotional needs. — William J Doherty

People say to me, 'Well, how do you direct Meryl Streep?' You're not wandering over to Meryl telling her how to act. She's an extraordinary talent and unbelievably hard working; she works harder than anyone I have ever worked with before. — John Wells

Instead of working hard to keep their share of a shrinking pie, or working even harder to make sure the industry stays as is, I think the most essential thing legacy book industry players can do is set up independent ventures with great people and little interference and work really hard to put themselves out of business by starting at the bottom, not by reinforcing the top. — Seth Godin

We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we're not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance - the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach. — J.D. Vance

I think anyone's success depends on working hard, Industriousness and Enthusiasm, enjoying what you are doing. You can't work your best if you're not enjoying what you are doing. No way you can force yourself to. — John Wooden

A long-term relationship is about showing up and working hard and banking on each other. If one's down, the other might be up and can help the other one up, and sometimes you're both down and you just [band] together. Endurance is a big theme of it for me. That might not sound romantic, but I kind of think that it is. — Rob Delaney

I like people with big talents and small neuroses - not always an easy combination to find. I've discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get. — Mel Brooks

I was charging forward too hard, into too many war zones, working too long, drinking too heavily, pushing forward, pushing forward. And who knows, had this not happened, maybe I would have been one of the casualties as a journalist covering the war. Who knows, maybe I would have been captured and tortured somewhere along the line, because I always pushed things to the limit. — Brad Willis

If you're not afraid of working hard, self-reliance comes easy! — Lorii Myers

When I'm working, I have a hard time switching off, and when I'm not working, I have a hard time thinking of ever wanting to work again. — Natalie Massenet

You really work in those conditions?"

She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: "And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?"

They didn't answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn't tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn't happen to the women important to them and that - this was the idea they had grown up with - they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off," she said, "you and the working class. — Elena Ferrante

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hard-working. — Joyce Carol Oates

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science. — Yann Martel

As long as I keep fighting every day, I know my dreams will happen. Most often, our dreams will not unfold exactly the way we expect them to, but if we keep working hard, our dreams WILL happen as long as we BELIEVE in them and in ourselves. This is called having faith, and it is a very important component of success!"-Naima Mora — Naima Mora

you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for "personal intercourse," substituted the safer "personal influence," and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.
Originally Rickie had meant to help boys in the anxieties that they undergo when changing into men: at Cambridge he had numbered this among life's duties. But here is a subject in which we must
inevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie's line, so he abandoned these
subjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy. — E. M. Forster

Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist's urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world. — Michael Chabon

I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I'm fine, good night, please, thank you, you're welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them. — Elizabeth Moon

To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop. — Anthony Doerr

Some coaches are on power trips. I've never needed somebody to tell me I'm not working hard enough. — Mark Warkentin

Luck does not come around often. So when it does, be sure to take full advantage of it, even if it means working very hard. When luck is on your side it is not the time to be modest or timid. It is the time to go for the biggest success you can possibly achieve. That is the true meaning of thinking big. — Donald J. Trump

Capitalism is a system that works extremely well for someone who is highly motivated and very energetic, but it is not a great system for someone who is not interested in working hard or for someone who feels no need to contribute to the economic well-being of their community. — Ben Carson

If you spend too much time learning the 'tricks' of the trade, you may not learn the trade. There are no shortcuts. If you're working on finding a short cut, the easy way, you're not working hard enough on the fundamentals. You may get away with it for a spell, but there is no substitute for the basics. And the first basic is good, old fashioned hard work. — John Wooden

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves. — Christopher Hitchens

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil. — Ralph Fiennes

Just because we are working hard does not mean we are making anything happen. — Wayne Muller

But exceptional performance depends not only on the groundwork we lay through Deliberate Practice; it also requires the right working conditions. And in contemporary workplaces, these are surprisingly hard to come by. — Susan Cain