Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth.
The nation was founded and "dedicated," to use Lincoln's language in the "Gettysburg Address," to equality as a "self-evident truth." But this very principle of equality, as Lincoln also noted, was a "proposition." To make it a reality remained "the unfinished work" of Americans.
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
In our dreams lies our unfinished work for the world.
Never show unfinished work.
While I am humbled by the widespread encouragement of so many and hold in the highest esteem those who serve us in federal office, I know that my head and my heart, my young family's future, and our unfinished work all remain firmly in the State of California - not Washington D.C. Therefore I will not seek election to the U.S. Senate in 2016.
I never want projects to be finished; I have always believed in unfinished work. I got that from Schubert, you know, the 'Unfinished Symphony.'
A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.
God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexplicably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.
Our true remembrance to President Kennedy is in our actions to honor the unspoken words and finish the unfinished work today and tomorrow and for as long as it takes.
Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.
At my age, I realize that my most precious possession is time, and I've got too much unfinished work to do to spend even a minute talking about myself.
Of course I’m going to learn from the greats—Ronnie Lott, Ed Reed, Troy Polamalu. But there’s a lot of unfinished work they didn’t do. I want to be the standard. I want to redefine what it means to be a safety.
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.
I think that, at least in my experience, it is difficult when there is unfinished work. That makes it difficult to think of dying when what you have to do is not quite done. Of course it's never quite done.
But 18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, there still remains unfinished work to completely rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our Nations history.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here so nobly advanced.
I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.
or simply:
