Now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.

Ill doers in the end shall ill receive.

Any job I do—if it doesn’t work, somebody pays. Possibly hundreds or thousands of somebodies. That’s the price of good engineering; nobody notices you did your job right.

The reality is that you will never get much done unless you go ahead and do it before you are ready.

If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get.

If you wait for someone to give you a job title before you do the work, you might never get to do the work at all.

The flaw in the work is the flaw in the man.

A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.

He who doesn't prize his past, ill-prepares his future.

How can you pay contractors such a percentage when the work which was supposed to be done is lacking?

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that's finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who's crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it's even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That's enough for me, or it isn't enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.

But who does not see that the work goes beyond the one who created it? It marches before him and he will never again be able to catch up with it, it soon leaves his orbit, it will soon belong to another, since he, more quickly than his work, changes and becomes deformed, since before his work dies, he dies.

Don't throw good time after bad work.

Never expect a perfect work from an imperfect man