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.
The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.
The labor ministry's position is to protect the right of workers to strike.
Readers soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost.
Sublime tobacco! which from east to west
Cheers the tar's labor or the Turkman's rest.
All this care for the world, we must believe, is taken by the Gods without any act of will or labor.
Care and labor are as much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light...
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
What I believe, what the Labor Party believes, is that marriage is between a man and a woman.