quotations about labor
It is better to drink the wine of industry from an earthen cup, than the wine of indolence from a silver tankard.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
As brightness is to rustiness, so labor excelleth idleness.
THALES
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.
LUDWIG VON MISES
Liberalism
In proportion as labor is divided, arts are perfected.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Labour is the source of every blessing.
AESOP
"The Brazier and His Dog", Aesop's Fables
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
Our experience tells us what is labour and recreation.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
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
It is good to labor; it is also good to rest from labor.
HORACE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
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
It has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
"Fragments of a Tariff Discussion", December 1, 1847
It is to labor, and to labor only, that man owes everything possessed of exchangeable value. Labor is the talisman that has raised him from the condition of the savage: that has changed the desert and the forest into cultivated fields; that has covered the earth with cities, and the ocean with ships; that has given us plenty, comfort, and elegance, instead of want, misery, and barbarism.
JOHN RAMSAY MCCULLOCH
The Principles of Political Economy
Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.
KARL MARX
The Communist Manifesto
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
Labour is the root of riches.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
You don't deserve any more than your labor is worth, it doesn't matter how rich a business owner is. If you don't risk your own wealth to start your own business, you don't deserve to become wealthy like those business owners you envy.
BURGESS KRELL
user comment, "Taxpayers No Longer Have to Pay Cops to Work for Union", WND, August 11, 2015
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