LABOR QUOTES III
quotations about labor
Providence has decreed that those common acquisitions, money, gems, plate, noble mansions, and dominion, should be sometimes bestowed on the indolent and unworthy; but those things which constitute our true riches, and which are properly our own, must be procured by our own labor.
ERASMUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
The motto marked upon our foreheads, written upon our door-posts, channeled in the earth, and wafted upon the waves, is and must be, "Labor is honorable, and idleness is dishonorable."
T. CARLYLE
attributed, Life's Common Way
The only real riches are labor; everything else is but the sign or abuse of it.
LEMONTEY
attributed, A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association
The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its price tag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.
LEAH HAGER COHEN
Glass, Paper, Beans: Revolutions on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things
He that labors is tempted by one devil; he that is idle, by a thousand.
ITALIAN PROVERB
How happy he who crowns in shades like these, A youth of labour with an age of ease.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Deserted Village
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
Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
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
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
remarks at the 75th Anniversary Celebration of Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., "To Men of Vision and High Purpose", May 3, 1941
Labour is the root of riches.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
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
Our experience tells us what is labour and recreation.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The qualities of labor, like tools,
Grow brighter when used.
SUSAN H. BOGGS
"Labor", Poems
Without work men are utterly undone.
NEVIL SHUTE
Ruined City
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
Under the regime of property, labor is not a condition, but a privilege.
PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON
What is Property?
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