Labor Quotes

No man e'er was glorious, who was not laborious. - Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1734


I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade.  It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.  - D.H. Lawrence


Heaven is blessed with perfect rest but the blessing of earth is toil.  - Henry van Dyke


If you want to kill time, try working it to death.  - Sam Levonson


A hand that's dirty with honest labor is fit to shake with any neighbor. - Proverb


To labor is to pray.  - Motto of the Benedictines


A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work.  - Geoffrey Norman


The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.  - Isak Dinesen


Sweat cleanses from the inside.  It comes from places a shower will never reach.  - George Sheehan


No man is born into the world whose work
Is not born with him; there is always work
And tools to work withal, for those who will....
- James Russell Lowell


Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.  - Charles Wagner


God sells us all things at the price of labor.  - Leonardo da Vinci


Dare to be honest and fear no labor. - Robert Burns


Nothing got without pains but an ill name and long nails.  - Scottish Proverb


"I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want."  - Voltaire


Boredom is a sickness the cure for which is work; pleasure is only a palliative.  - Le Duc de Lévis, Mémoires


What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions.  - Arnold Glasow


Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.  - Marc Chagall


It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair.  Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.  - Charles Baudelaire


When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.  - Pablo Picasso


There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.  - Oscar Wilde


We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies.  Very few people can endure much leisure.  - Gerald Brenan, Thoughts in a Dry Season


Without labor nothing prospers.  - Sophocles


Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body.  No laborious person was ever yet hysterical.  - Thomas Jefferson, 1787


It is only the constant exertion and working of our sensitive, intellectual, moral, and physical machinery that keep us from rusting, and so becoming useless.  - Charles Simmons


Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.  It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.  - Adam Smith


Take a man out of the trenches, make him a straw boss, and he develops a belly. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)




Employment is nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness.  - Galen


Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.  - Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard


Everybody loves some fun, back-breaking manual labor! - Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo video game) written by Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka, and Toshihiro Kawabata


For me the diamond dawns are set
In rings of beauty,
And all my ways are dewy wet
With pleasant duty.
- John Townsend Trowbridge


There are only three instincts: eating-drinking, sex, and work. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Believe me, the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, eats oftener a sweeter morsel, however coarse, than he who procures it by the labor of his brains. - Washington Irving, letter to Pierre Paris Irving (nephew), 1824 December 7th


Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them. - Joseph Joubert


What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds. - Will Rogers


People love chopping wood.  In this activity one immediately sees results.  - Albert Einstein


Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.  - Alice Walker


Hard work, worry and whiskey are the friends of man. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


A mind always employed is always happy.  This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.  - Thomas Jefferson


God give me work, till my life shall end
And life, till my work is done.
- Epitaph of Winifred Holtby


A man who has no office to go to - I don't care who he is - is a trial of which you can have no conception.  - George Bernard Shaw


Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.  - Henry Ford


[T]he voluntary exercise of energy would be thought so delightful, that people would not dream of handing over its pleasure to the jaws of a machine.... this kind of division of labour is really only a new and wilful form of arrogant and slothful ignorance, far more injurious to the happiness and contentment of life than the ignorance of the processes of nature.... [T]he true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life, in elevating them by art instead of handing the performance of them over to unregarded drudges, and ignoring them... - William Morris, "The Aims of Art," 1887


To a bee, honey is work
To us, it is leisure, luxury, pleasure.
If only the eating thereof
would fill us with the spirit of hard work.
- Terri Guillemets, "Labor, Honey, Life"


Temperance and labor are the two true physicians of man.  - Jean Jacques Rousseau


As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey. - Thomas A. Edison


Hard work is rewarding beyond gold. Sweating is living. - Terri Guillemets


It is better to wear out than to rust out. - Richard Cumberland


We seem as a nation to be suffering from a mania for play.  The huge development of pleasure-chasing automobiles merely symbolizes our universal restless eagerness to be running after something, anything, that we can classify as diversion.  Under pressure from tormenting constituents our legislatures are piling up holidays.  And the cry of labor everywhere is "Cut down hours; cut down hours," until it seems as if brief, tired minutes were all that would be left for work.  The obvious deduction is that work is always something to be got rid of, as if it were a curse.  Yet life is work.  - Author unknown, editorial from Labor Digest, June 1922, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren


When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.  - Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Maybe a person's time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.  - Frank A. Clark


Thank God every morning when you get up, that you have something to do that day which must be done, whether you like it or not.  Being forced to work and forced to do your best will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle never know.  - Charles Kingsley