These industrious quotes will inspire you. Industrious, diligent, and hard-working.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging industrious quotes, industrious sayings, and industrious proverbs.
Best Industrious Quotes
- “Any reward that is worth having only comes to the industrious. The success which is made in any walk of life is measured almost exactly by the amount of hard work that is put into it.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Fools wait for a lucky day, but everyday is a lucky day for an industrious man.” ~ Gautama Buddha
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“Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.” ~ Johann Sebastian Bach
- “I was made to work. If you are equally industrious, you will be equally successful.” ~ Johann Sebastian Bach
- “The true end of education is not only to make the young learned, but to make them love learning; not only to make them industrious, but to make them love industry; not only to make them virtuous, but to make them love virtue; not only to make them just, but to make them hunger and thirst after justice.” ~ John Ruskin
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“True education is that which proves useful in life and makes you industrious.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “The best that can be said of my life so far is that it has been industrious and the best that can be said of me is that I have not pretended to what I was not.” ~ Maria Mitchell
- “Some temptations come to the industrious, but all temptations attack the idle” ~ Charles Spurgeon
- “To do good work a man should no doubt be industrious. To do great work he must certainly be idle a well.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
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“An industrious sinner I much prefer to a lazy saint.” ~ Sophie Kerr
- “Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it.” ~ Alistair Cooke
- “If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.” ~ Brenda Ueland
- “Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least you will, by such conduct, stand the be.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “Industry need not wish, and he that lives upon hopes will die fasting. There are no gains without pains. He that hath a trade hath an estate, and he that hath a calling hath an office of profit and honor; but then the trade must be worked at and the calling followed, or neither the estate nor the office will enable us to pay our taxes. If we are industrious, we shall never starve; for at the workingman’s house hunger looks in, but dares not enter. Nor will the bailiff or the constable enter, for industry pays debts, while idleness and neglect increase them.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
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“Acting is easier – writing is more creative. The lazy man vies with the industrious.” ~ William Shatner
- “You must obey this now for a law, that he that will not work shall not eat (except by sickness he be disabled). For the labors of thirty or forty honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain a hundred and fifty idle loiterers.” ~ John Smith
- “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” ~ Manny Farber
- “Truly, this earth is a trophy cup for the industrious man. And this rightly so, in the service of natural selection. He who does not possess the force to secure his Lebensraum in this world, and, if necessary, to enlarge it, does not deserve to possess the necessities of life. He must step aside and allow stronger peoples to pass him by.” ~ Adolf Hitler
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“I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.” ~ Edna O’Brien
- “Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.” ~ William Graham Sumner
- “If thou be industrious to procure wealth, be generous in the disposal of it. Man never is so happy as when he giveth happiness unto another.” ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
- “Disdain the chain, preserve your freedom; and maintain your independency: be industrious and free; be frugal and free.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
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“Men are not really born either hopelessly idle, or preternaturally industrious. They may move in one direction or the other as will or circumstances dictate, but it is open to any man to work.” ~ Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook
- “Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “In such misfortunes my Mother was of an heroic spirit, in suffering patiently when there was no remedy, and being industrious where she thought she could help.” ~ Margaret Cavendish
- “Sad people dislike the happy, and the happy the sad; the quick thinking the sedate, and the careless the busy and industrious.” ~ Horace
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“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “The seed of God is in us. If the seed had a good, wise and industrious cultivator, it would thrive all the more and grow up to God whose seed it is, and the fruit would be equal to the nature of God. Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, a hazel seed into a hazel tree, and the seed of God into God.” ~ Meister Eckhart
- “Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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“Vanity is the natural weakness of an ambitious man, which exposes him to the secret scorn and derision of those he converses with, and ruins the character he is so industrious to advance by it.” ~ Joseph Addison
- “The details of our struggle to survive and prosper, in what has been a difficult and sometimes bitter relationship with a system of laws and practices that deny us access to the tools necessary for productive and industrious life, are available to any serious student of history or sociology.” ~ August Wilson
- “Lovers are commonly industrious to make themselves uneasy.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes
- “I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“There is precious little hope to be got out of whatever keeps us industrious, but there is a chance for us whenever we cease work and become stargazers.” ~ H. M. Tomlinson
- “It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “The homestead policy was established only after long and earnest resistance; experience proves its wisdom. The lands in the hands of industrious settlers, whose labor creates wealth and contributes to the public resources, are worth more to the United States than if they had been reserved as a solitude for future purchasers.” ~ Andrew Johnson
- “Equipped with cell phones, beepers, and handheld computers, the ‘conspicuously industrious’ blur the line between home and office by working anytime, anywhere.” ~ Jo Ann Davis
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“The lazy manage to keep up with the earth’s rotation just as well as the industrious.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “The whole strenuous intellectual work of an industrious research worker would appear, after all, in vain and hopeless, if he were not occasionally through some striking facts to find that he had, at the end of all his criss-cross journeys, at last accomplished at least one step which was conclusively nearer the truth.” ~ Max Planck
- “Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor.” ~ Baron de Montesquieu
- “It must be an industrious youth that provides against age; and he that fools away the one must either beg or starve in the other.” ~ Heath L’Estrange
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“The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It’s very clear that we humans don’t like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme – and our ingenuity so acute – that we’re eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday” ~ Charles Petzold
- “Spend everyday casual, but industrious Every moment alert, but relaxed.” ~ Guy Finley
- “All companies can benefit from fostering a more flexible environment (creating a place where the most talented, industrious, and entrepreneurial people want to work) and relinquishing hierarchical control to favor a results-oriented meritocracy.” ~ Maynard Webb
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“[T]he State . . . gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.” ~ Benjamin Tucker
- “England was killed by an idea: the idea that the weak, indolent and profligate must be supported by the strong, industrious, and frugal – to the degree that tax-consumers will have a living standard comparable to that of taxpayers; the idea that government exists for the purpose of plundering those who work to give the product of their labor to those who do not work. The economic and social cannibalism produced by this communist-socialist idea will destroy any society which adopts it and clings to it as a basic principle – ANY society.” ~ Dan Smoot
- “Poverty is dishonorable, not in itself, but when it is a proof of laziness, intemperance, luxury, and carelessness; whereas in a person that is temperate, industrious, just and valiant, and who uses all his virtues for the public good, it shows a great and lofty mind.” ~ Plutarch
- “For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle.” ~ H. L. Mencken
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“The loss of…honest and industrious men’s lives cannot be valued at any price.” ~ William Bradford
- “Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn’t a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter – for they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect. And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had – first they saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if one didn’t fit, why they chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine.” ~ Stanislaw Lem
- “Some are “industrious,” and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to suchI have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,–work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the ‘mountains & the woods’-the ‘altars’ of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
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“For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.” ~ John Carroll
- “Agriculture is the foundation of manufactures; since the productions of nature are the materials of art. Under the Roman empire, the labour of an industrious and ingenious people was variously, but incessantly employed, in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, their houses, and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendour, whatever could soothe their pride or gratify their sensuality.” ~ Edward Gibbon
- “Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is noninterference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Well for the drones of the social hive that there are bees of an industrious turn, willing, for an infinitesimal share of the honey, to undertake the labor of its fabrication.” ~ Thomas Hood
- “How many men
Have spent their blood in their dear country’s service,
Yet now pine under want; while selfish slaves,
That even would cut their throats whom now they fawn on,
Like deadly locusts, eat the honey up,
Which those industrious bees so hardly toil’d for.” ~ Thomas Otway - “Nature, being a wise and provident lady, governs her parts very wisely, methodically, and orderly: Also, she is very industrious and hates to be idle, which makes her employ her time as a good housewife doth.” ~ Margaret Cavendish
