The virtues, like the body, become strong more by labor than by nourishment.
Work Quotes
On this page Carlyle is first by count, followed by Shakespeare, Lincoln, Karl Marx and Albert Pike. The line most worth keeping is Mark Twain’s from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876): work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play of whatever a body is not obliged to do. Emerson’s May-Day and Other Pieces (1867) has a good one on the crowded hour, and Woody Allen’s joke about immortality through not dying is here as well.
Three entries are flagged. “I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours” is credited to Oscar Wilde and marked misattributed. Two sayings credited to Publilius Syrus, about doing nothing both hastily and prudently and about the man who loves labour always having something to do, are disputed.
Labor is the true alchemist that beats out in patient transmutation the baser metals into gold.
Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such.
The trouble with opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work.
Hasten slowly, and without losing heart,
Put your work twenty times upon the anvil.
He who prays and labours lifts his heart to God with his hands.
Ninety-five percent of all jobs suck, Jones. That’s why people get paid to do them.