Work and Profession

If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started

Make your vocation your vacation. That is the secret to success .

Great things can happen when you don't care who gets the credit.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

If on your own or by the criticism of others you discover error in your work, correct it then and there; otherwise in exposing your work to the public, you will expose your error also.

Nothing is more apt to deceive us than our own judgment of our work. We derive more benefit from having our faults pointed out by our enemies than from hearing the opinions of friends.

People of higher talent work, even if they seem to do nothing.

It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.

Even the richest soil, if left uncultivated will produce the rankest weeds.

Inaction saps the vigor of the mind.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?

Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.

Learn diligence before speedy execution.

Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.

Those who are enamored of practice without science are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty of where he is going. Practice should always be based upon a sound knowledge of theory.

The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.

If you do not rest on the good foundation of nature, you will labour with little honor and less profit.

Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more.

Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.