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.
Versailles was a gulf into which the labor of France poured its earnings; and it was never full.
When study becomes labor, we had better change the subject-matter as quickly as possible.
The post-Freudians … have fallen victim to the ravages of the intellectual division of labor.
Nature repairs her ravages, — repairs them with her sunshine, and with human labor.
Labor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie. Labor is fighting for a larger pie.
APPETITE, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.
A frame of adamant, a soul of fire,
No dangers fright him, and no labors tire.