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.
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
All the suns labor to kindle your flame and a microbe puts it out.
My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production.
While soldiers were winning victories, so-called labor leaders were engaged in high treason.
Come on, Amelia. We are not really British. We do not have to look down our noses at honest labor.