Work can be a lot of things.
Fun and exciting. Hopefully rewarding at times.
But also quite often overwhelming and needing more motivation than you may feel you can muster.
So in today’s post I want to share 120 of the most powerful, motivational, funny and positive work quotes.
I hope these timeless thoughts will give you a boost of energy, refuel your motivation and give you a couple of good laughs if you feel a bit stressed or under pressure right now.
Positive Work Quotes for Quick Motivation Right Now
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
– Arthur Ashe
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
– Zig Ziglar
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”
– Milton Berle
“Excellence is not a skill. It’s an attitude.”
– Ralph Marston
“Success is not final; failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
– Winston S. Churchill
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
– Wayne Gretzky
“Magic is believing in yourself. If you can make that happen, you can make anything happen.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
– Steve Jobs
“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The future depends on what you do today.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you’re willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.”
– Lou Holtz
“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
– Peter Drucker
“Whatever you are, be a good one.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Turn your wounds into wisdom.”
– Oprah Winfrey
“The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.”
– Benjamin E. Mays
“All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.”
– Walt Disney
Short Positive Work Quotes for a Great Day
“Work hard. Be kind.”
– Conan O’Brien
“Focus on the good.”
– Zig Ziglar
“Dreams don’t work unless you do.”
– John C. Maxwell
“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
– Steve Martin
“Dream big and dare to fail.”
– Norman Vaughan
“Make each day your masterpiece.”
– John Wooden
“Impossible is for the unwilling.”
– John Keats
“Every moment is a fresh beginning.”
– T.S. Eliot
“Happiness is not by chance but by choice.”
– Jim Rohn
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”
– Henry Ford
“Light tomorrow with today.”
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
– Yoda
“The harder I work the more I live.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“Impossible is just an opinion.”
– Paulo Coelho
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”
– Babe Ruth
“Make it happen.”
– Gary Vaynerchuk
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
– Steve Jobs
“Create your future.”
– Peter F. Drucker
“Dream bigger.”
– Tony Hsieh
“Attitude is everything.”
– Charles Swindoll
Funny and Positive Work Quotes for a Laugh and Stress Relief
“I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.”
– Charles Lamb
“To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone.”
– Reba McEntire
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
– Bill Gates
“I work for myself, which is fun. Except when I call in sick, I know I’m lying.”
– Rita Rudner
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”
– Zig Ziglar
“I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.”
– Lily Tomlin
“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in the dark with a mosquito.”
– Betty Reese
“Television is not real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.”
– Bill Gates
“Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.”
– Robert Orben
“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.”
– Robert Frost
“Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
– Thomas Edison
“Nothing is impossible. The word itself says ‘I’m possible!’”
– Audrey Hepburn
“I am an early bird and a night owl. So I am wise, and I have worms.”
– Michael Scott (from the TV-show The Office)
“Age is of no importance unless you’re a cheese.”
– Billie Burke
“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”
– Mark Twain
“Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?”
– Edgar Bergen
“A diamond is merely a lump of coal that did well under pressure.”
– Henry Kissinger
“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
– Vidal Sassoon
“If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving definitely isn’t for you.”
– Steven Wright
“The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.”
– Stanley J. Randall
Positive Hard Work Quotes to Help You Make Your Dreams Real
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”
– Tim Notke
“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”
– Pele
“The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person’s determination.”
– Tommy Lasorda
“The hard work definitely paid off and hard work always does.”
– Gabby Douglas
“Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses.”
– Kobe Bryant
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
– Stephen King
“If you do the work you get rewarded. There are no shortcuts in life.”
– Michael Jordan
“I strongly believe if you work hard, whatever you want, it will come to you.”
– Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
“A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.”
– Colin Powell
“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.”
– Dwayne Johnson
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“The only way to achieve the impossible is to believe it is possible.”
– Charles Kingsleigh
“Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.”
– Henry Ford
“Without labor, nothing prospers.”
– Sophocles
“The fruit of your own hard work is the sweetest.”
– Deepika Padukone
“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”
– Michelangelo
“Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.”
– Oprah Winfrey
“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and common sense.”
– Thomas Edison
“Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.”
– Malcolm Forbes
“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
– Colin Powell
Positive Work Quotes for Setbacks and Those Tough Days in Life
“Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking about.”
– Winston Churchill
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been
trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”
– Michael Jordan
“The best way out is always through.”
– Robert Frost
“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
– Thomas Edison
“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”
– Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”
– Dale Carnegie
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
– Nelson Mandela
“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.”
– Walter Elliot
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
– Albert Einstein
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
“A bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make the turn.”
– Helen Keller
“We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.”
– Arianna Huffington
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”
– Charles R. Swindoll
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
– Thomas Edison
“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
– Dale Carnegie
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
– C.S. Lewis
“No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.“
– Napoleon Hill
“Difficulties strengthen the mind as labor does the body.”
– Seneca
“Tough times never last, but tough people do.”
– Dr. Robert Schuller
Positive Work Quotes for Success and Living Your Best Life
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”
– Conrad Hilton
“Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted.”
– David Bly
“The best revenge is massive success.”
– Frank Sinatra
“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
– Winston Churchill
“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”
– Robert Collier
“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”
– Arthur Ashe
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
– Albert Schweitzer
“Self-belief and hard work will always earn you success.”
– Virat Kohli
“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.”
– Booker T. Washington
“All roads that lead to success have to pass through hard work boulevard at some point.”
– Eric Thomas
“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”
– Henry Ford
“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.”
– Jim Rohn
“Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.”
– Albert Einstein
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
– Mark Twain
“Happiness is the real sense of fulfillment that comes from hard work.”
– Joseph Barbara
“Through perseverance, many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.”
– Benjamin Disraeli
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.”
– Steve Jobs
“The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs… one step at a time.”
– Joe Girard
“Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph.”
– Zig Ziglar
Want more motivation for work? Then check out these hard work quotes, the hilarious work quotes for less stress here and also these short and inspirational work quotes.