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.
I am a real representative of the working class because I earn my living by my actual manual labor.
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
The lover of education labors first of all to educate himself.
Global poverty is an "input" on the supply side; the global economic system feeds on cheap labor.
War may achieve a redistribution of resources, but labor, not war, creates wealth.
The representatives of labor should have a voice in the management of the business.