Productivity Quotes

“Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.”

“We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We ought to break our days and our marches into two.”

“The man who can master his time can master nearly anything.”

“Guard your own spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds.”

“So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.”

“The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs, Losing both beauty and utility.”

“Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task”

“Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.”

“I drink a great deal. I sleep a little, and I smoke cigar after cigar. That is why I am in two-hundred-percent form.”

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

“We've got more productive capacity now than we ever have.”

“The clock upbraids me with the waste of time.”

“Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.”

“Be a busy person. People who are active are often much more at peace with themselves than those who are inactive and inert.”

“Generally, we have translated greater output in the few hours of work per week over the last century. And that's a good trend of the future. But we do have to have a system that, as output of goods and services keeps increasing per capita, that it takes care of the people who are willing to work and really are not getting by very well with a family on a 40-hour week.”

“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”

“We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”

“The good husband finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed, or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the Department of State.”

“The best way to deal with procrastination is to postpone it.”

“The American worker is more productive than he's ever been.”

“Time is one of the biggest issues you'll see. People just do not know how to maximize their time. The way in which you execute and utilize time is everything. And most people push up against the threshold of their control.”

“Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.”

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”

“Where focus goes, energy flows.”

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”