The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.

The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

Action expresses priorities.

An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

The truth is, anyone can start projects. The world is full of just-started projects that looked great at the time but were never completed.

One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance – the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

Well, I’m working all the time to stay out of trouble!

Short cuts make long delays.

This is Sunday, and the question arises, what’ll I start tomorrow?

My strong point, if I have a strong point, is performance. I always do more than I say. I always produce more than I promise.

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have no time in the day to themselves.

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Always do whatever’s next.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

He that rises late must trot all day.

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

We had to go on and do the work of the court and we did.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

It’s an offseason. These days are valuable for everybody.

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

Do Lipton employees take coffee breaks?

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

The best workers, like the happiest livers, look upon their work as a kind of game: the harder they play the more enjoyable it becomes.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

If I’ve got something do. I’m going to attack it. I’m going to attack that stress.

I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

People are so caught in a routine, doing the same things over and over.

Yes, sir, no, sir, clock in, clock out. Why were you late? Why are you not in today? That’s not how humans are supposed to live.

If you’re not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.

I always have to be writing.