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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:

Embryonic artworks grow
In the womb heart of the artists,
Until the fever of making seizes their limbs,
And they deliver their art through labors of love.

Alex Grey Art Psalms (2008)

(I) have been an interested student of the labor and Socialist movements for more than 30 years.

Lena Morrow Lewis Letter to Morris Novik (1936)

Imagining and building a future for human labor that includes more and more intelligent technology is the concern of everyone

Linda Dounia Rebeiz

Ye rigid Ploughmen! bear in mind
Your labor is for future hours.
Advance! spare not! nor look behind!
Plough deep and straight with all your powers!

Richard Henry Horne The Plough: Quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

These big growers have a lot of money because we earned all that money for them. Because of our sweat and our labor that we put on the land.

Jessie Lopez De La Cruz Oral History (1980)

his has largely been caused by lack of knowledge on labor laws and directives among human resource management. Otherwise this is an uncalled for loss

Angelina Muganza

An army is strengthened by labor and enervated by idleness. Troops are not to be led to battle unless confident of success. (General Maxims)

Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

Be industrious. Be not afraid or ashamed to do manual labor. Productive toil is conducive to economic security and adds to the wealth of the nation.

Manuel L. Quezon

"During our Zoom interview just before Labor Day. She notes that nothing less that winning each World Cup is the expectation placed on the USA’s women."

Mia Hamm

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor.

Bret Harte The Heathen Chinee (1870)

The fact is, Burke is smarter than two thirds of the Western Australian Labor Party rolled together

Paul Keating

if you increase living standards you make labor more productive. This is why Asia today is becoming more productive than the United States.

Michael Hudson

With any minority group, marginalized communities, there’s extra labor

Terri Lyne Carrington

The hope lives on age after age,
Earth with its beauty might be won
For labor as a heritage,
For this has Ireland lost a son.

George William Russell To the Memory of Some I knew Who are Dead and Who Loved Ireland (1917)

We’re going to see an inflation uptick, and we’re going to see a weaker labor market as a result of all that has already been done.

Natasha Sarin

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

Emil Cioran The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Zikora (2020)

On Marx’s view an individual is flourishing when … he labors freely, meaning that work is an end-in-itself, and not merely a means to “earn a living.”

Brian Leiter

It is only by labor, incessant labor, in season and out of season, that we can create such a public sentiment as we need

Abby Kelley Foster The Overthrow of Slavery (1863)

How poor is the memory of those right wing leaders that are blind to reason — who refuse to see that the interests of labor and the people are one

Luisa Moreno Address to California CIO (1949)

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