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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.

Random quote on Work

Most quoted on work:

Here, on this side of the grave,
Here, should we labor and love.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

If the dictators and militarists who used to start wars had to earn by manual labor what their wars cost, there would have been very few wars.

Jack Vance Vandals of the Void (1953)

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

John Kenneth Galbraith A History of Economics (1991)

Through idleness, lusts and harmful thoughts grow, but through the exercise of labor, vices are likewise diminished.

Isidore of Seville

Profane history shows that the Lacedaemonians, who were gentiles, did not practice capital punishment; but they imprisoned them and them at labor.

Menno Simons

Christianity was the temple that was to be eternal, and on it, as unconscious builders, men were laboring in all the ages from the creation.

Cyrus David Foss

Whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.

Cicero

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

Isaiah

Today human activity, the labor of the human body, is rapidly being engineered out of working life.

John F. Kennedy

Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.

John Kenneth Galbraith The New Industrial State (1967)

What a son I’ve made. The midwives must have turned me in my labor so that I lay on your brain and crushed it.

Tanith Lee The Storm Lord (1976)

I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.

John Kenneth Galbraith The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)

There is a knowledge which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labor.

John Henry Newman The Idea of a University (1873)

He mocks the people who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor.

Grover Cleveland

"Maybe I should ask for blessings on my mission against all those who wear white after Labor Day."

Cassandra Clare City of Ashes (2008)

Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society.

Charles A. Reich The Greening of America (1970)

If a woman with property needs the ballot, a woman who has nothing but her labor power needs two ballots.

Gertrude Breslau Hunt

Quid me autem sic ille movet, superetne labores
an cadat?

Valerius Flaccus

Labor honestly, conscientiously, and steadfastly, and recognition and success must crown your efforts in the end.”

Williamina Fleming

New laws, in themselves, do not bring a millennium; new laws do not pretend to prevent labor disputes, nor do they cover all industry and all labor.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

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