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.
While strength and years permit, endure labor; soon bent old age will come with silent foot.
Free men freely work:
Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.
Our fruitless labours mourn,
And only rich in barren fame return.
Keep doing some kind of work, that the devil may always find you employed.
Hard toil can roughen form and face,
And want can quench the eye's bright grace.
Many faint with toil,
That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.