Genius begins great works, labor alone finishes them.—Joubert.
As steady application to work is the healthiest training for every individual, so is it the best discipline of a state. Honorable industry always travels the same road with enjoyment and duty, and progress is altogether impossible without it.—Samuel Smiles.
Nature is just towards men. It recompenses them for their sufferings; it renders them laborious, because to the greatest toils it attaches the greatest rewards.—Montesquieu.
Virtue's guard is Labor, ease her sleep.—Tasso.
Alexander the Great, reflecting on his friends degenerating into sloth and luxury, told them that it was a most slavish thing to luxuriate, and a most royal thing to labor.—Barrow.
Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael.—Goethe.
He that thinks that diversion may not lie in hard labor forgets the early rising and hard riding of huntsmen.—Locke.
The pain of life but sweetens death; the hardest labor brings the soundest sleep.—Albert Smith.
What men want is not talent, it is purpose; not the power to achieve, but the will to labor.—Bulwer-Lytton.
The true epic of our times is not "arms and the man," but "tools and the man," an infinitely wider kind of epic.—Carlyle.