quotations about labor
Under the regime of property, labor is not a condition, but a privilege.
PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON
What is Property?
As salt savors the broth, so does labor give a relish to pleasure.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Labour is the root of riches.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is good to labor; it is also good to rest from labor.
HORACE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Labour is good for a man, bracing up his energies to conquest,
And without it life is dull, the man perceiving himself useless.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Labor, laughing at difficulties, spans majestic rivers, carries viaducts over marshy swamps, suspends bridges over deep ravines, pierces the solid mountains with the dark tunnel, blasting rocks and filling hollows, and, while linking together all nations of the earth pities the proud fool and laughs him to scorn. He shall pass to dust, forgotten; but Labor will live forever, glorious in its conquests and monuments, and will keep organized no matter how many temporary defeats it endures.
NEWMAN HALL
"The Dignity of Labor", The Golden Treasury of Poetry and Prose
How happy he who crowns in shades like these, A youth of labour with an age of ease.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Deserted Village
It's hard to find cheap labor in the land of the brave and free. And the only thing that's better, that's if they work for free.
RICHARD FORD
Poems Written by a Government Prisoner in Georgia, USA
Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
Labour is the source of every blessing.
AESOP
"The Brazier and His Dog", Aesop's Fables
There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Labor in all its variety, corporeal and mental, is the instituted means for the methodical development of all our powers, under the direction and control of will.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
Gold-Foil
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina
Labour, though it was at first inflicted as a curse, seems to be the gentlest of all punishments, and is fruitful of a thousand blessings.
JOHN ROGERS PITMAN
"Goodness of God", A Second Course of Sermons for the Year
One of the huge disadvantages of being an American is that most of the hard labor is done for us.
JOSH DAFFERN
"10 Things That Will Ruin Your 2016 If You're Not Careful", Patheos, February 17, 2016
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
attributed, A Martin Luther King Treasury
Without work men are utterly undone.
NEVIL SHUTE
Ruined City
The qualities of labor, like tools,
Grow brighter when used.
SUSAN H. BOGGS
"Labor", Poems
Our experience tells us what is labour and recreation.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It has been said "that he who works prays;" and certainly one of the best prayers that a working man with a large and young family can offer up is to steadily stick to his work. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, was the son of a working carpenter, and it is believed by many Theologians that our Saviour followed that trade (whatever it was in those days) until he was thirty years of age. If then God's only Son, the right hand of the throne of heaven, the King of men, the only sinless, spotless, perfect child, youth, and man, was a labourer, IS THERE NOT DIGNITY IN LABOUR? The happiest man is the working man, and if there is any real happiness in this world it is in the neat but humble cottage, where peace and love reign, and the industrious wife is the true helpmate of the working man; and not in the palace, where the bloated aristocrat, recovering from an attack of gout or some other punishment for excess, sits, trying to kill time, with bleared eyes (and often of idiotic expression) gazing into vacancy, surrounded by all that wealth can buy or human ingenuity contrive to make him comfortable, but with all not happy.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On the Dignity of Labour", Short Essays