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Labor Quotations




Unknown Author (top)
There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.
- Unknown Author
We seem as a nation to be suffering from a mania for play. The huge development of pleasure-chasing automobiles merely symbolizes our universal restless eagerness to be running after something, anything, that we can classify as diversion. Under pressure from tormenting constituents our legislatures are piling up holidays. And the cry of labor everywhere is "Cut down hours; cut down hours," until it seems as if brief, tired minutes were all that would be left for work. The obvious deduction is that work is always something to be got rid of, as if it were a curse. Yet life is work.
- Unknown Author


Charles Baudelaire (top)
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
- Charles Baudelaire


Gerald Brenan (top)
We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.
- Gerald Brenan


Marc Chagall (top)
Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.
- Marc Chagall


Frank A. Clark (top)
Maybe a person's time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.
- Frank A. Clark


Isak Dinesen (top)
The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.
- Isak Dinesen


Henry Van Dyke (top)
Heaven is blessed with perfect rest but the blessing of earth is toil.
- Henry Van Dyke


Thomas Alva Edison (top)
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
- Thomas Alva Edison


Albert Einstein (top)
People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
- Albert Einstein


Martin H. Fischer (top)
Take a man out of the trenches, make him a straw boss, and he develops a belly.
- Martin H. Fischer
Sweat silently. Let's have no squawking about a little expenditure of energy.
- Martin H. Fischer


Henry Ford (top)
Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.
- Henry Ford


Anatole France (top)
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
- Anatole France


Arnold Glasow (top)
What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions.
- Arnold Glasow


Thomas Jefferson (top)
A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.
- Thomas Jefferson


Charles Kingsley (top)
Thank God every morning when you get up, that you have something to do that day which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work and forced to do your best will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle never know.
- Charles Kingsley


D.H. Lawrence (top)
I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.
- D.H. Lawrence


Pablo Picasso (top)
When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.
- Pablo Picasso


Antonio Porchia (top)
When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.
- Antonio Porchia


Scottish Proverb (top)
Nothing got without pains but an ill name and long nails.
- Scottish Proverb


Jean Jacques Rousseau (top)
Temperance and labor are the two true physicians of man.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau


George Bernard Shaw (top)
A man who has no office to go to - I don't care who he is - is a trial of which you can have no conception.
- George Bernard Shaw


George Sheehan (top)
Sweat cleanses from the inside. It comes from places a shower will never reach.
- George Sheehan


Charles Simmons (top)
It is only the constant exertion and working of our sensitive, intellectual, moral, and physical machinery that keep us from rusting, and so becoming useless.
- Charles Simmons


Adam Smith (top)
Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.
- Adam Smith


Sophocles (top)
Without labor nothing prospers.
- Sophocles


Leonardo da Vinci (top)
God sells us all things at the price of labor.
- Leonardo da Vinci


Voltaire (top)
"I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want."
- Voltaire