Keeping the motivation up isn’t always easy.
No matter if you’re leading a team at work, trying to get things done alongside your favorite coworker or simply powering through yourself until the weekend is here.
So in today’s post I want to help out with that by sharing 120 of the most positive, inspirational, funny and motivational quotes for employees.
To give yourself and your team a jolt of new energy, to help you turn a tired or unmotivated day around and to give you a few laughs to help release some stress and tension.
Motivational Quotes for Employees for a Jolt of Energy
“Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.”
– Sam Levenson
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”
– Wayne Gretzky
“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.”
– Seth Godin
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
– Arthur Ashe
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
– Nelson Mandela
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
– Zig Ziglar
“Don’t wish it were easier. Wish you were better.”
– Jim Rohn
“Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
– Winston Churchill
“A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing grows there.”
– John Assaraf
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
– Mark Twain
“Opportunities don’t happen. You create them.”
– Chris Grosser
“Don’t count the days, make the days count.”
– Muhammad Ali
“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.”
– Michael Jordan
“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”
– Napoleon Hill
“Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting.”
– Larry Page
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
– Walt Disney
“Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.”
– Madam C. J. Walker
“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”
– Henry Ford
“Either you run the day, or the day runs you.”
– Jim Rohn
Short and Positive Quotes for Employees, Staff and Success
“Well done is better than well said.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.”
– Frank Ocean
“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”
– Harry Golden
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
– Beverly Sills
“The road to success is always under construction.”
– Lily Tomlin
“Quality is not an act; it is a habit.”
– Aristotle
“Greatness begins beyond your comfort zone.”
– Robin Sharma
“Dream big and dare to fail.”
– Norman Vaughan
“Becoming is better than being.”
– Carol Dweck
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
– Buddha
“Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.”
– John W. Gardner
“The future depends on what you do today.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“The most effective way to do it is to do it.”
– Amelia Earhart
“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
– Japanese Proverb
“The expert in anything was once a beginner.”
– Helen Hayes
“Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.”
– John F. Kennedy
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
– Peter Drucker
“Always deliver more than expected.”
– Larry Page
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
– Frederick Douglass
“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”
– Zig Ziglar
Motivational Teamwork Quotes for Employees from Leaders
“I’m not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than the right idea.”
– Ed Catmull
“Leaders who don’t listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.”
– Andy Stanley
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
– Helen Keller
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”
– Henry Ford
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”
– Michael Jordan
“It is amazing how much you can accomplish when it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.”
– Harry S. Truman
“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”
– Ryunosuke Satoro
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”
– Phil Jackson
“A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.”
– Arnold Glasow
“It is better to have one person working with you than three people working for you.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
– African Proverb
“A single leaf working alone provides no shade.”
– Chuck Page
“The nice thing about teamwork is that you always have others on your side.”
– Margaret Carty
“Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure.”
– Stanley McChrystal
“Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.”
– Doris Kearns Goodwin
“When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.”
– Joe Paterno
“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.”
– Rosalynn Carter
“Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it.”
– Brian Tracy
Employee Appreciation Quotes on Rewarding Hard Work
“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”
– Sam Walton
“Employees engage with employers and brands when they’re treated as humans worthy of respect.”
– Meghan M. Biro
“Everyone wants to be appreciated, so if you appreciate someone, don’t keep it a secret.”
– Mary Kay Ash
“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought and attended to my answer.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.”
– Angela Ahrendts
“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.”
– Simon Sinek
“When you do something beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun, every morning, is a beautiful spectacle, and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”
– John Lennon
“People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition.”
– Bob Nelson
“Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.”
– Stephen R. Covey
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”
– Vincent van Gogh
“Take time to appreciate employees, and they will reciprocate in a thousand ways.”
– Bob Nelson
“To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace.”
– Doug Conant
“Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.”
– Herb Kelleher
“Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.”
– Fred Allen
“Research indicates that workers have three prime needs: interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company.”
– Zig Ziglar
“If you don’t create a great, rewarding place for people to work, they won’t do great work.”
– Ari Weinzweig
“Goodness and hard work are rewarded with respect.”
– Luther Campbell
“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
– Stephen King
“The real competitive advantage in any business is one word only, which is ‘people.’”
– Komil Toume
“Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.”
– Robert Half
Inspirational Quotes for Coworkers to Brighten Their Day
“If people are doubting how far you can go, go so far that you can’t hear them anymore.”
– Michele Ruiz
“Don’t dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer.”
– Denis Waitley
“A positive attitude gives you power over your circumstances instead of your circumstances having power over you.”
– Joyce Meyer
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
– Anne Frank
“Optimist: someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it’s more like a cha-cha.”
– Robert Brault
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
– Helen Keller
“Remember that just because you hit bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there.”
– Robert Downey Jr.
“Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.”
– Oprah Winfrey
“Challenges are what make life interesting, and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.”
– Joshua J. Marine
“I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.”
– Maya Angelou
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
– Voltaire
“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”
– Babe Ruth
“Focus on the journey, not on arriving at a certain destination.”
– Chris Hadfield
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
– Winston Churchill
“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
– Vincent van Gogh
“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”
– Yvon Chouinard
“Find a job you like and you add five days to every week.”
– H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“The difference between try and triumph is just a little umph!”
– Marvin Phillips
“Where people aren’t having fun, they seldom produce good work.”
– David Ogilvy
“Your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you.”
– Stephen R. Covey
Funny and Somewhat Motivational Quotes for Employees
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
– Douglas Adams
“I always give 100% at work: 10% Monday, 23% Tuesday, 40% Wednesday, 22% Thursday, and 5% Friday.”
– Unknown
“Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.”
– Ray Kroc
“Coworkers are like Christmas lights. They hang together, half of them don’t work, and the other half aren’t so bright.”
– Unknown
“Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”
– Will Rogers
“I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
– Jerome K. Jerome
“Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?”
– Edgar Bergen
“The only thing that ever sat its way to success was a hen.”
– Sarah Brown
“If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock.”
– Claude McDonald
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.”
– Zig Ziglar
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
– Thomas Edison
“Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.”
– Sam Ewing
“The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs, one step at a time.”
– Joe Girard
“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
– Vidal Sassoon
“Doing nothing is very hard to do. You never know when you’re finished.”
– Leslie Nielsen
“Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.”
– Doug Larson
“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in the dark with a mosquito.”
– Betty Reese
“My boss told me to start every presentation with a joke. The first slide was my paycheck.”
– Unknown
“You never become a howling success by just howling.”
– Bob Harrington
“Be like a postage stamp. Stick to a thing till you get there.”
– Josh Billings
Want more inspiration (and less stress) at work? Then have a look at these motivational teamwork quotes, the short work quotes here and also this one with lots of funny work quotes.