Quotes - Years of Service

It is more difficult to be an honorable man for a week than to be a hero for fifteen minutes.

Jules Renard

I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day. 

Abraham Lincoln

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Theodore Roosevelt

Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.

William Shakespeare,Troilus and Cressida

Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves – to break our records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today.

Stewart B. Johnson

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

Arnold Toynbee

Winning the prize wasn't half as exciting as doing the work itself.

Maria Goeppert Mayer on winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1963

The years teach us what the days never knew.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture.  It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.

Valclav Havel

The gent who wakes up and finds himself a success hasn't been asleep.

Wilson Mizner

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.

Robert Louis Stevenson

To love what you do and feel that it matters — how could anything be more fun?

Katharine Graham

People forget how fast you did a job-- but they remember how well you did it.

Howard W. Newton

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Francis Bacon

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.

Ellen Goodman

True worth is in being, not seeming —
In doing, each day that goes by,
Some little good —

Alice Cary

Men talk of victory as if victory were something fortunate.
Work is victory.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.

John Ruskin

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

Indira Gandhi

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Henry David Thoreau

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

Gary Player

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count.  It's the life in your years.

Abraham Lincoln

Experience: a comb life gives you after you lose your hair.

Judith Stern

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

Harry S. Truman

When the sun rises, I go to work.
When the sun goes down, I take my rest,
I dig the well from which I drink,
I farm the soil which yields my food,
I share creation. Kings can do no more.

Chinese Proverb, 2500 BC