41 Hard Work Quotes To Fire You Up & Get You Motivated
For when you need a little reminder that your hard work will pay off.
PKpix / Shutterstock It’s hard to go it alone in anything in life. Working hard and maintaining motivation is a personal journey, but drawing on hard work quotes and inspiration from others can help keep us going when the going gets tough.
Hard work is critical to getting anywhere in life and sometimes we need a reminder of that.
If there was a formula to success, then there would be a consensus. It’s true that hard work alone can’t guarantee success — everyone needs to get a little lucky eventually.
But we can’t let that discourage us, because even though we sometimes need to wait on an opportunity, we always need to be ready for it.
We don’t work hard to guarantee success, we work hard to guarantee that we are ready to jump on the opportunities that will eventually come our way.
The following is a list of hard work quotes from greats and unknowns alike about their own experiences and journeys working hard to succeed when the opportunity arose.
The best thing that we can do is look to others, not as blueprints for success, but as inspiration to find our own way.
Famous Hard Work Quotes
1. "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle." - Abraham Lincoln
2. "I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson
3. "Without labor nothing prospers." - Sophocles
4. "What comes easy won’t last. What lasts won’t come easy." - Barack Obama
5. "There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work." - Calvin Coolidge
6. "There is no substitute for hard work." - Thomas Edison
7. "Success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come." - Dwayne Johnson
8. "Success at anything will always come down to this: Focus and effort, and we control both." - Dwayne Johnson
9. "There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits." - Michael Phelps
10. "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.
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Quotes to Inspire Perseverance and Determination
11. "Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses." - Kobe Bryant
12. "Hard work beats talent if talent doesn’t work hard." - Tim Notke
13. "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
14. "Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually, it'll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off." - Kevin Hart
15. "A dream does not become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work." - Colin Powell
16. "Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds." - Gordon B. Hinckley
17. "Luck is great, but most of life is hard work." - Iain Duncan Smith
18. "Hard work betrays none." - Hachiman Hikigaya
19. "What comes easy won’t last. What lasts won’t come easy." - Unknown
20. "All roads that lead to success have to pass through hard work boulevard at some point." - Eric Thomas
21. "Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did." - Newt Gingrich
22. "It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up." - Vince Lombardi
Quotes to Inspire Hard Work and Teamwork
23. "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." - Michael Jordan
24. "Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." - Henry Ford
25. "The best teamwork comes from men who are working independently toward one goal in unison." - James Cash Penney
26. "No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team." - Reid Hoffman
27. "If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else." - Booker T. Washington
28. "If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself." - Henry Ford
29. "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." - Unknown
30. "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." - Harry Truman
Quotes About Hard Work in Business
31. "Hard work is an essential element in tracking down and perfecting a strategy or in executing it." - Charlie Munger
32. "There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them." - Seth Godin
33. "I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite." - Gilbert Keith Chesterton
34. "I think that my biggest attribute to any success that I have had is hard work. There really is no substitute for working hard." - Maria Bartiromo
35. "Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it." - William Durant
36. "The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." - Walt Disney
37. "I never dreamed about success. I worked for it." - Estée Lauder
38. "It’s not about money or connections – it’s the willingness to outwork and outlearn everyone." - Mark Cuban
39. "The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor." - Proverbs 12:24
40. "Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work." - Stephen King
41. “Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. This improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.” - Elon Musk
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Dan O'Reilly is a writer who covers news, politics and social justice. Follow him on Twitter.