In the field of ideas not involving productive activities it is easier to distinguish the division between material and spiritual necessity. For a long time man has been trying to free himself from alienation through culture and art. While he dies every day during the eight or more hours that he sells his labour, he comes to life afterwards in his spiritual activities. But this remedy bears the germs of the same sickness; it is as a solitary individual that he seeks communion with his environment.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

The last 29 days of the month are the hardest.

I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.

If we look at our work immediately after completing it, we are still too involved; if too long afterwards, we cannot pick up the thread again.

I've always believed that if you put in the work, the results will come. I don't do things half-heartedly. Because I know if I do, then I can expect half-hearted results.

I can never stop working hard. Each day I feel that I have to improve. Hard work…Determination…I gotta keep pushing myself.

It is warm work; and this day may be the last to any of us at a moment. But mark you! I would not be elsewhere for thousands. At the Battle of Copenhagen (2 April 1801)

Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

The little engine labors and grows, performs more and more involved operations, becomes sensitive to ever subtler influences and now there manifests itself in the fully developed being — Man — a desire mysterious, inscrutable and irresistible: to imitate nature, to create, to work himself the wonders he perceives.
Inspired to this task he searches, discovers and invents, designs and constructs, and covers with monuments of beauty, grandeur and awe, the star of his birth. He descends into the bowels of the globe to bring forth its hidden treasures and to unlock its immense imprisoned energies for his use. He invades the dark depths of the ocean and the azure regions of the sky. He peers in the innermost nooks and recesses of molecular structure and lays bare to his gaze worlds infinitely remote. He subdues and puts to his service the fierce, devastating spark of Prometheus, the titanic forces of the waterfall, the wind and the tide. He tames the thundering bolt of Jove and annihilates time and space. He makes the great Sun itself his obedient toiling slave. Such is his power and might that the heavens reverberate and the whole earth trembles by the mere sound of his voice.

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. [...] I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor. (19 October 1931)

I was sacked from Dunkin' Donuts for squirting the donut jelly all over the customers. About working in Dunkin' Donuts in New York before becoming famous.