Work Quotes: For Motivation, Success, & Balance

By Kelsey Schultz, Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Work stress can get us down, but sometimes a little shift in perspective is all we need to pick ourselves back up. Discover work quotes to motivate and inspire you.
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Job burnout is something many of us have experienced at least once. Burnout is caused by prolonged exposure to chronic work stress and typically causes us to feel exhausted and cynical (Maslach et al., 2001). Burnout can be hard on our mental health, which can affect every aspect of our lives. One way we can fight burnout is by shifting our perspective and changing our response to the stressors we experience at work (Demerouti, 2015). 
​Thought-provoking and inspirational work quotes can help us shift our perspective in times when the stress begins to feel overwhelming. Having these quotes on hand is a great idea for the next time you need a little inspiration, motivation, or perspective.

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Motivational Quotes for Work

  • “Failure is not the opposite of success: it’s part of success.” – Arianna Huffington
  • “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
  • “All things are difficult before they are easy.” – Thomas Fuller
  • “If your dreams don’t scare you, they are too small.” – Richard Branson
  • “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” – Theodore Roosevelt
  • “Without labor nothing prospers.” – Sophocles
  • “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.” – Jimmy Johnson
  • “Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.” – Booker T. Washington
  • “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” – Peter Drucker
  • “Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.” – John F Kennedy
  • “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing; that’s why we recommend it daily.” – Zig Ziglar
  • “The best revenge is massive success.” – Frank Sinatra
  • “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – Barack Obama
  • “What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.” – Ralph Stripey Guy Emerson

Quotes for Hard Work and Dedication

  • “All life demands struggle. Those who have everything given to them become lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the real values of life. The very striving and hard work that we so constantly try to avoid is the major building block in the person we are today.” – Pope Paul VI
  • “Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.” – Horace
  • “Working hard is very important. You're not going to get anywhere without working extremely hard.” – George Lucas
  • “Nothing will work unless you do.” – Maya Angelou
  • “The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.” – Harry Golden
  • “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” – Tim Notke
  • “Hard work spotlights the character of people. Some turn up their sleeves. Some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.” – Sam Ewing
  • “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” – Theodore Roosevelt
  • “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” – Samuel Goldwyn
  • “The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.” – Elbert Hubbard
  • “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas A. Edison

Quotes for Work Ethics

  • “Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work - and realizing what is an opportunity and what isn't.” – Lucille Ball
  • “And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy's sleeping? I'm working.” – Will Smith
  • “No one can arrive from being talented alone, work transforms talent into genius.” – Anna Pavlova
  • “I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.” – Ray Bradbury
  • “No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.” – Max Beerbohm
  • “Be humble. Be hungry. And always be the hardest worker in the room.” – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
  • “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
  • “Work hard and be kind and amazing things will happen.” – Conan O’Brien
  • “Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.” – Newt Gingrich
  • “Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.” – Frank Ocean,

Quotes for Working Together

  • “Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” – Vince Lombardi
  • “Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.” – Sheryl Sandberg
  • “The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.” – Daniel Kahneman
  • “Coming together is beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” – Henry Ford
  • “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” – Michael Jordan
  • “Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.” – Sheryl Sandberg
  • “When you have that respect from your teammates, it makes it a lot more comfortable.” – LeBron James

Quotes for Work-Life Balance

  • “Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.” – Johnny Carson
  • “A good job is more than just a paycheck. A good job fosters independence and discipline, and contributes to the health of the community. A good job is a means to provide for the health and welfare of your family, to own a home, and save for retirement.” – James H. Douglas, Jr.
  • “No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office.” – Paul Tsongas
  • “Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.” – Gustave Flaubert
  • “Balance is not better time management, but better boundary management. Balance means making choices and enjoying those choices.” – Betsy Jacobson
  • “Don’t confuse having a career with having a life.” – Hillary Clinton
  • “Work-life balance is not an entitlement or benefit. Your company cannot give it to you. You have to create it for yourself.” – Matthew Kelly
  • “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” – Stephen Covey
  • “You have to balance your passions, not your time.” – Lisa Sugar
  • “You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” – Charles Buxton

Quotes for Work Friends

  • “When I speak with people who love their jobs and have vital friendships at work, they always talk about how their workgroup is like a family.” – Tom Rath
  • “Life can be uncertain, work can be unpredictable. But by having good friends around you, support is guaranteed.” – Kishan S Chauhan
  • “I would totally hang out with you even if we weren’t paid.” – Unknown
  • “It’s a very special thing when you go and get to work with your best friend every day.” – Nick Frost
  • “I always say I’m not going to work; I’m going to play with my friends.” – Brian Tyree Henry
  • “When you’re working with your friends, it doesn’t feel like it’s work.” – Ken Jeong
  • “I have no desire to go to work and not work with my friends.” – Xavier Woods

Inspirational Quotes for Work

  • “Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.” – Frank Gehry
  • “Inspiration comes of working every day.” – Charles Baudelaire
  • “To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.” – Bette Davis
  • “A river cuts through a rock not because of its power but its persistence.” – Jim Watkins,
  • “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese proverb
  • “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King, Jr
  • “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” – Amelia Earhart
  • “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” – William Faulkner
  • “The expert in anything was once a beginner.” – Helen Hayes
  • “The only way to enjoy anything in this life is to earn it first.” – Ginger Rogers

Zen Quotes for Work

  • “Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.” – Rumi
  • “Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.” – Khalil Gibran
  • “You're blessed if you have the strength to work.” – Mahalia Jackson
  • “Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.” – George Sand
  • “When a work lifts your spirits and inspires bold and noble thoughts in you, do not look for any other standard to judge by: the work is good, the product of a master craftsman.” – Jean de la Bruyere
  • “Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.” – Anne Frank
  • “Let us realize that: the privilege to work is a gift, the power to work is a blessing, the love of work is success!” – David O. McKay
  • “A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” – Albert Camus
  • “Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it.” – Chinese proverb
  • “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
  • “It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.” Benjamin Franklin

Quotes for Stress at Work

  • “Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress: Working hard for something we love is called passion.” – Simon Sinek
  • “Trying to be a perfectionist brings increased stress and hinders performance.”  – T. Whitmore
  • “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” – Marcus Aurelius
  • “Believing that you must do something to perfection is a recipe for stress, and you’ll associate that stress with the task and thus condition yourself to avoid it.” – Steve Pavlina
  • “Stress, anxiety, and depression are caused when we are living to please others.” – Paulo Coelho
  • “Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.” – David Allen
  • “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” – Helen Keller
  • “When money becomes your purpose, stress and depression become your path.” – Prabakaran Thirumalai

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Books & Products Related to Work Quotes

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Final Thoughts on Quotes for Work

There will almost certainly be times in which your work is making you feel stressed, discouraged, or lost. Being ready for those moments by having some positive work quotes on hand can help you move through those moments with more ease. For more uplifting quotes for work, check out this video.

Video: Positive Quotes For Work

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