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Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving. ~ Mortimer Adler
Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself. ~ Apollonius of Tyana

Work or labor is intentional activity people perform to support themselves, others, or the needs and wants of a wider community. Work is fundamental to all societies, but can vary widely within and between them, from gathering in natural resources by hand, to operating complex technologies that substitute for physical or even mental effort by many human beings. Labor is effort expended on a task.


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Quotes

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A

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  • No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair. It began with a rally on May 4, 1886, but the consequences are still being felt today. Although the rally is included in American history textbooks, very few present the event accurately or point out its significance.
    • William J. Adelman "The Haymarket Affair". illinoislaborhistory.org. Retrieved March 19, 2014.
  • Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.
    • Mortimer Adler, A Vision of the Future : Twelve Ideas for a Better Life and a Better Society (1984).
  • Since the heart is an accumulator and transmuter of various energies, there must be more favorable conditions for arousing and attracting these energies. The most fundamental condition is work, mental as well as physical. In the motion of work, energies are gathered from space; but one must understand work as a natural process that enriches life. Thus, every kind of work is a blessing, while the vagaries of inaction are extremely harmful in a cosmic sense. Love for the endlessness of labor is in itself an initiation of considerable degree; it prepares you for the conquest of time. Being in a condition where you have conquered time guarantees you a place in the Subtle World, where work is an unavoidable condition, just as it is in the body. A complaint about having to work can only come from a slave of the body.
  • I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
    • Woody Allen, as quoted in Silent Strength (1990) by Lloyd John Ogilvie, p. 111.
  • The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.
    • Núria Añó, in the short story 2066. Beginning the age of correction.
  • I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.
  • Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.
  • Our characters are the result of our conduct.
    • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 3, chapter 5, section 12 (c. 335 BC)

B

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  • And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure."
    • Richard Bach, Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977).
  • The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
    • Richard Bach, Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977).
  • You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.
    You may have to work for it, however.
    • Richard Bach, Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977).
  • It is a strange desire which men have, to seek power and lose liberty.
  • Measure not the work
    Until the day's out and the labour done,
    Then bring your gauges.
  • Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
    • J. M. Barrie, as quoted in The new dictionary of thoughts: a Cyclopedia of Quotations (1930) edited by Tryon Edwards, C. N. Catrevas, Jonathan Edwards, and Ralph Emerson Browns.
  • Unless we abandon the work ethic of another era, ... lives may be wasted because of blind insistence that everyone must have a "job" even if the job is useless.
  • You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
    • Warren Beatty, as quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever : Why The Left Is Right (2004) by William Martin, p. 213.
  • Work is healthy, you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.
    • Henry Ward Beecher, as quoted in The Teachers' Institute, Vol. 18, No. 1 (September 1895), p. 16.
  • When God wanted sponges and oysters, He made them and put one on a rock and the other in the mud. When He made man, He did not make him to be a sponge or an oyster; He made him with feet and hands, and head and heart, and vital blood, and a place to use them, and He said to him, Go Work.
  • No one should ever work.
    Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
    That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive.
  • Wealth is the offspring of intelligence and of work, the soul and the life of humanity. But these two forces can act only with the help of a passive element, the soil, which they make productive by their combined efforts.It would seem, therefore, that this indispensable instrument should belong to all men.
    • Louis Blanc, "The Man Who Makes the Soup Should Get to Eat It", (1834).
  • Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven't planted.
    • David Bly, as quoted in Peace of Mind : Daily Meditations for Easing Stress (1995) by Amy Dean, p. 187.
  • The reign of capital, which denies our very existence as human beings and reduces us to ‘things’, seems very serious, methodical and disciplined. But its possessive paroxysm, its ethical rigour, its obsession with ‘doing’ all hide a great illusion: the total emptiness of the commodity spectacle, the uselessness of indefinite accumulation and the absurdity of exploitation. So the great seriousness of the world of work and productivity hides a total lack of seriousness.
  • By the way,
    The works of women are symbolical.
    We sew, sew, prick our ringers, dull our sight,
    Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
    To put on when you're weary—or a stool
    To tumble over and vex you * * * curse that stool!
    Or else at best, a cushion where you lean
    And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
    But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
    This hurts most, this * * * that, after all, we are paid
    The worth of our work, perhaps.
  • Get leave to work
    In this world,—'tis the best you get at all.
  • Let no one till his death
    Be called unhappy. Measure not the work
    Until the day's out and the labour done.
  • Free men freely work:
    Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.
  • When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse.
  • … productivity gains frequently cause upheaval: Both capital and labor can pay a terrible price when innovation or new efficiencies upend their worlds.
    We need shed no tears for the capitalists (whether they be private owners or an army of public shareholders). It’s their job to take care of themselves. ...
    A long-employed worker faces a different equation. When innovation and the market system interact to produce efficiencies, many workers may be rendered unnecessary, their talents obsolete. Some can find decent employment elsewhere; for others, that is not an option.
    …
    The answer in such disruptions is not the restraining or outlawing of actions that increase productivity. Americans would not be living nearly as well as we do if we had mandated that 11 million people should forever be employed in farming.
    The solution, rather, is a variety of safety nets aimed at providing a decent life for those who are willing to work but find their specific talents judged of small value because of market forces. (I personally favor a reformed and expanded Earned Income Tax Credit that would try to make sure America works for those willing to work.) The price of achieving ever-increasing prosperity for the great majority of Americans should not be penury for the unfortunate.
  • How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
  • Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.
  • And still be doing, never done.
  • Such hath it been—shall be—beneath the sun
    The many still must labour for the one.
    • Lord Byron, The Corsair (1814), Canto I, Stanza 8.
Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal — to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification. ~ Voltairine de Cleyre.
Do the day's work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a stand-patter, but don't be a stand-patter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don't be a demagogue. Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don't hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation. ~ Calvin Coolidge
Work makes one free. ~ Lorenz Diefenbach
Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing. ~ Thomas Edison
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. ~ Albert Einstein
If A equals success, then the formula is: A equals X plus Y plus Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut. ~ Albert Einstein
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. ~ Friedrich Engels
Men work together, wether they work together or apart. ~ Robert Frost
The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them. ~ Robert Frost
A man who works at another’s will, not for his own passion or his own need, but for money or honor, is always a fool. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The very nature of work will change. The governments may have to consider stronger social safety nets, and eventually universal basic income. ~ António Guterres
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. ~ Elbert Hubbard
To work for a living certainly cannot be the meaning of life, since it is indeed a contradiction that the continual production of the conditions is supposed to be the answer to the question of the meaning of that which is conditional upon their production. ~ Søren Kierkegaard

C

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  • Work — other people's work — is an intolerable idea to a cat. Can you picture cats herding sheep or agreeing to pull a cart? They will not inconvenience themselves to the slightest degree.
    • Louis J. Camuti, as quoted in On the Art of Business (2004) by James H Merkel and Abdul Wahad Al-Falaij, p. 257.
  • Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind — honest work, which you intend getting done.
    • Thomas Carlyle, On the Choice of Books : The Inaugural Address of Thomas Carlyle, Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh (1866).
  • There's a time when you have to separate yourself from what other people expect of you, and do what you love. Because if you find yourself 50 years old and you aren't doing what you love, then what's the point?
    • Jim Carrey, as quoted in A Touch of Class (2003) by Carol Vanderheyden, p. 70.
  • Every one is the son of his own works.
  • Labor is discovered to be the grand conqueror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles.
  • A rational, moral being cannot, without infinite wrong, be converted into a mere instrument of others’ gratification. He is necessarily an end, not a means. A mind, in which are sown the seeds of wisdom, disinterestedness, firmness of purpose, and piety, is worth more than all the outward material interests of a world. It exists for itself, for its own perfection, and must not be enslaved to its own or others’ animal wants.
  • The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat.
  • Remember, work, well done, does good to the man who does it. It makes him a better man.
  • Work is the Rent we pay for our time on Earth.
  • Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal — to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification.
    • Voltairine de Cleyre, "Direct Action" (1912), in Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre -- Anarchist, Feminist, Genius, SUNY Press, 10 February 2005, p. 280.
  • If you work hard, you do your part, you should be able to give your children all the opportunities they deserve. That is the basic bargain of America.
  • I believe that every employee, from the CEO suite to the factory floor, contributes to a business’ success, so everybody should share in the rewards – especially those putting in long hours for little pay.

D

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  • Though thousands of people indulge themselves in it regularly, and even develop a taste for it, there is no doubt in my mind (and that of scientists whom I employ to prove it) that Work is a dangerous and destructive drug, and should be called by its right name, which is Fatigue.
  • I spent a busy day today, but got little done. This is because I am at last becoming perfect in the art of seeming busy, even when very little is going on in my head or under my hands. This is an art which every man learns, if he does not intend to work himself to death.
  • To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
    • Bette Davis, The Lonely Life : An Autobiography (1962).
  • Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
    • Bette Davis, as quoted in The Quotable Woman, 1800-1975 (1977) by Elaine Partnow, p. 315.
  • Workingmen of the country ... toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest — this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it.
  • Arbeit macht frei.
    • Work makes (one) free.
      • Title of a 1873 novel by Lorenz Diefenbach, which became an infamous slogan above the gates of several Nazi concentration camps.
  • The phrase "work-life balance" tells us that people think that work is the opposite of life. We should be talking about life-life balance.

E

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  • All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
  • For what profit comes to mortals from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which they toil under the sun? Every day sorrow and grief are their occupation; even at night their hearts are not at rest. This also is vanity.
  • Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
    • Thomas Edison, as quoted in An Enemy Called Average (1990) by John L. Mason, p. 55.
  • Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.
  • I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours — and thrived on it. An hardwork can make you to have a successfull future.There can be many fails maybe in our life but have to ready to face it for a hardworked work.
    • Thomas Edison, diary entry quoted in Defending and Parenting Children Who Learn Differently : Lessons from Edison's Mother (2007) by Scott Teel, p. 12.
  • When modern men and women insist that they feel completely free in their work, they are in a sense telling the truth, for the triumph of conformity lies in the crushing of all resistance, all experience of conflict.
  • Every individual should have the opportunity to develop the gifts which may be latent in him. Alone in that way can the individual obtain the satisfaction to which he is justly entitled; and alone in that way can the community achieve its richest flowering. For everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
    • Albert Einstein, as quoted in Educational Trends : Journal of Research and Interpretation (June 1936), p. 32.
  • If A equals success, then the formula is: A equals X plus Y plus Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
    • Albert Einstein, as quoted in Kiplinger's Personal Finance, Vol. 11, No. 7 (July 1957), p. 48
  • The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
  • The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class.
  • There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today.
  • The costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.
  • Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic."
    • Barbara Ehrenreich, "Goodbye to the Work Ethic" (1988), in The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1991).
  • He who understands the limits of life knows how easy it is to procure enough to remove the pain of want and make the whole life complete and perfect. Hence he has no longer any need of things which are not to be won save by labor and conflict.

F

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  • Every employee in an undertaking, then, takes a larger or smaller share in the work of administration, and has, therefore, to use and display his administrative faculties. This is why we often see men, who are specially gifted, gradually rise from the lowest to the highest level of the industrial hierarchy, although they have only had an elementary education. But young men, who begin practical work as engineers soon after leaving industrial schools, are in a particularly good position both for learning administration and for showing their ability in this direction, for in administration, as in all other branches of industrial activity, a man’s work is judged by its results.
    • Henri Fayol, (1900) Henri Fayol addressed his colleagues in the mineral industry 23 June 1900.
  • The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.
  • It's a living.
  • Peacefulness to be found in writing. Why do I not write every day? Partly because I feel I ought to write well and know I can't. But that is not a good enough reason for not writing, if it gains me poise & peace.
  • The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
    • Robert Frost, as quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) edited by Herbert Victor Prochnow.

G

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  • I need to wake out of my stupor and begin work. ...my body stands frozen in a snow packed tundra waiting for rescue. It may take a few days before that happens, since my mind is on vacation in Alberta right now.
  • My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.
    • Indira Gandhi, as quoted in Taking Charge : Every Woman's Action Guide to Personal, Political and Professional Success (1996) by Joan Steinau Lester, p. 76.
  • For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.
  • Ein Mensch, der um anderer willen, ohne dass es seine eigene Leidenschaft, sein eigenes Bedürfnis ist, sich um Geld oder Ehre oder sonst etwas abarbeitet, ist immer ein Tor.
  • A man who works at another’s will, not for his own passion or his own need, but for money or honor, is always a fool.
  • Insofar as our culture conventionally construes technical, scientific, and professional roles as those that obligate men to ignore all but the technical implications of their work, the very social structure itself is inherently pathogenic. The social function of such a segmented role structure is akin to that of the reflexive obedience induced by military training. The function of such a technical role structure, as of military discipline, is to sever the normal moral sensibilities and responsibilities of civilians and soldiers and to enable them to be used as deployables, willing to pursue practically any objective. In the last analysis, such arrangements produce an unthinking readiness to kill or to hurt others - or to produce things that do so - on order.
  • Nothing is more laborious for you than not to labor at all—in other words, to despise everything that gives rise to our labors, which means all that is subject to change.
    • Guigo I, The Meditations of Guigo I, Prior of the Charterhouse, as translated by A. Gordon Mursell (1995), #50

H

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  • If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get.
    • Bill Haywood, Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood (1983) by Peter Carlson, p. 146
    • Paraphrased variant: For every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated to produce a dollar he never received.
  • Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.
    • Heinrich Heine, History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Vol. III (1834).
  • One of the curious features of Impressionism... was the casualness of their work. ...[T]he painters gave the impression of hastily concocted canvases... more... inspiration than... patient labor. The effortless stroke of genius became a leading measure of artistic quality, partly because it denied mere "work." ..."Art for art's sake" was an invention of the romantic era in France. ...They looked towards a mythical past in which the "natural" person could cultivate self-expression, free of the claims of social utility. This fantasized past... had an anti-industrial character. ...Work was despised because the growing industrial revolution was separating it from inventiveness, originality, and individualism. ...The inventiveness and spontaneity that independent artists sought were... opposed to industrial work,... products (with which they associated academic art) and for many... cities... Women and men held parasols and croquet mallets, not sickles and hoes, and dahlias were more attractive than cabbages. (It is true that Pissarro retained much of the outlook of Barbizon artists...) The work ethic implicit in Barbizon art... was done away with by the impressionists. The suburb and the coastal resort, not the farm, is the landscape of Morisot, Renoir, Manet, and Monet. ...The Impressionists ...joined other middle-class vacationers (except for Cézanne and Pissarro, so little in sympathy with Parisian society).
    • Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (1988) p. 304-306.
  • If little labour, little are our gaines:
    Man's fortunes are according to his paines.
  • The economic system denies the right of the sincerest and most sympathetic to keep their hands out of the blood of their brothers. We may not go to our rest at night, or waken to our work in the morning, without bearing the burden of the communal guilt; without being ourselves creators and causes of the wrongs we seek to bear away. At every step, when we would do good, evil is present with us, and exacts its tribute from the very citadel of the soul. ... If we stay at our posts, in order that we may change the system, we are on the backs of our brothers; if we desert our posts, in order that we may get off our brothers' backs, we take bread from their mouths, from the mouths of their children, and add to the army of the workless and hopeless.
  • Hillel stood in the gate of Jerusalem one day and saw the people on their way to work. "How much,"​ he asked, "will you earn today?"​ One said: "A denarius"​; the second: "Two denarii"​ "What will you do with the money?"​ he inquired. "We will provide for the necessities of life."​ Then he said to them: "Would you not rather come and make the Torah your possession, that you may possess both this world and the world to come?"
    • The Jewish Encyclopedia, Volume 6, p. 399
  • I believe that the best way to prepare for a Future Life is to be kind, live one day at a time, and do the work you can do best, doing it as well as you can.
    • Elbert Hubbard, "Credo", as published in A Message to Garcia, and Thirteen Other Things (1901), p. 6.
  • One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
  • If you want work well done, select a busy man ‚ the other kind has no time.
  • The highest reward that God gives us for good work, is the ability to do better work.

I

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  • I've had the best possible chance of learning that what the working-classes really need is to be allowed some part in the direction of public affairs, Doctor—to develop their abilities, their understanding and their self-respect.
    • Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, English adaptation by Max Faber (1970), act II, p. 28. Mr. Hovstad is speaking.
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. ~ L. P. Jacks

J

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  • The philosopher bent on the enlargement of experience perceives at once that his work cannot be done, cannot even be commenced, until he has cleared away the heaps of verbal detritus under which the bedrocks of experience lie buried.
  • We are the children of an age which spends the best energies of its life in the discussion of life, in an atmosphere of deferred fulfillment, continually postponing the act of living to the work of mentally preparing to live.
  • A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
    • L. P. Jacks, Education through Recreation (1932), p. 1.
  • We do 30 to 40 percent of the nation's work for 1 percent of the returns, and a huge pool of us is always kept unemployed to reduce the value of the labor of those who are.
  • It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
  • The error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work.

K

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  • Jesus ... combines all duties (1) in one universal rule (which includes within itself both the inner and the outer moral relations of men), namely: Perform your duty for no motive other than unconditioned esteem for duty itself, i.e., love God (the Legislator of all duties) above all else; and (2) in a particular rule, that, namely, which concerns man’s external relation to other men as universal duty: Love every one as yourself, i.e., further his welfare from good-will that is immediate and not derived from motives of self-advantage. These commands are not mere laws of virtue but precepts of holiness which we ought to pursue, and the very pursuit of them is called virtue.
    • Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Book IV, Part 1, Section 1, “The Christian religion as a natural religion”
  • It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.
  • To work for a living certainly cannot be the meaning of life, since it is indeed a contradiction that the continual production of the conditions is supposed to be the answer to the question of the meaning of that which is conditional upon their production.
  • In the last analysis, what is the significance of life? If we divide mankind into two great classes, we may say that one works for a living, the other does not need to. But working for a living cannot be the meaning of life, since it would be a contradiction to say that the perpetual production of the conditions for subsistence is an answer to the question about its significance which, by the help of this, must be conditioned. The lives of the other class have in general no other significance than that they consume the conditions of subsistence. And to say that the significance of life is death, seems again a contradiction.
  •  

You can do it quickly, but badly, or you can do it slowly, but well. After a while, everyone will forget that it was fast, but will remember that it was bad. And vice versa.

 

Можно сделать быстро, но плохо, а можно — медленно, но хорошо. Через некоторое время все забудут, что было быстро, но будут помнить, что было плохо. И наоборот.

  • If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too.
No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. ~ Abraham Lincoln
Instead of pitting people against each other, the (local currency) system... enables us to consciously design money to work for us, instead of us for it. ~ Bernard Lietaer

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  • The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
    • Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy (1883), H. Kerr, trans. (1907), pp. 11-12.
  • No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.
  • A full-fledged UBI — one that unconditionally provides every person with enough income to meet their basic needs—would fundamentally alter the paradigm of capitalism that has locked workers into the dominant system ever since its inception. Capitalism has endured by commoditizing people’s lives, forcing them to sell the bulk of their available time and energy, or else face destitution and starvation. A true UBI would transform the relationship between labor and capital and weaken the power of the wealthy elite to control the population.
  • Computers and robots replace humans in the exercise of mental functions in the same way as mechanical power replaced them in the performance of physical tasks. As time goes on, more and more complex mental functions will be performed by machines. Any worker who now performs his task by following specific instructions can, in principle, be replaced by a machine. This means that the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish—in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.
  • Local currency creates work, and I make a distinction between work and jobs. A job is what you do for a living; work is what you do because you like to do it. I expect jobs to increasingly become obsolete, but there is still an almost infinite amount of fascinating work to be done... What's nice about local currency is that when people create their own money, they don't need to build in a scarcity factor. And they don't need to get currency from elsewhere in order to have a means of making an exchange with a neighbor... As soon as you have an agreement between two people about a transaction... they literally create the necessary "money" in the process; there's no scarcity of money. That does not mean there's an infinite amount of this currency, either; you cannot give me 500,000 hours - nobody has 500,000 hours to give. So there's a ceiling on it, yes, but there's no artificial scarcity.
  • Instead of pitting people against each other, the (local currency) system actually ... enables us to consciously design money to work for us, instead of us for it. ..These objectives are in our grasp within less than one generation's time. Whether we materialize them or not will depend on our capacity to cooperate with each other to consciously reinvent our money... For the first time in human history we have available the production technologies to create unprecedented abundance...
  • I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, that the working men are the basis of all governments, for the plain reason that they are the more numerous, and as you added that those were the sentiments of the gentlemen present, representing not only the working class, but citizens of other callings than those of the mechanic, I am happy to concur with you in these sentiments, not only of the native born citizens, but also of the Germans and foreigners from other countries.
    • Abraham Lincoln, speech to Germans at Cincinnati, Ohio (February 12, 1861) [Commercial version]; in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 4, p. 202.
  • In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread"; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour. And inasmuch [as] most good things are produced by labour, it follows that [all] such things of right belong to those whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] 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 (c. December 1, 1847); in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 1, p. 407–8.
  • It is better, then, to save the work while it is begun. You have done the labor; maintain it—keep it. If men choose to serve you, go with them; but as you have made up your organization upon principle, stand by it; for, as surely as God reigns over you, and has inspired your mind, and given you a sense of propriety, and continues to give you hope, so surely will you still cling to these ideas, and you will at last come back after your wanderings, merely to do your work over again.
    • Abraham Lincoln, speech at Chicago, Illinois (July 10, 1858); in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 2, p. 498.
  • Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
    • Abraham Lincoln, First State of the Union Address (December 3, 1861); in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 5, p. 52.
  • The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer, was the hanging of some working people by other working people. It should never be so. The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.
    • Abraham Lincoln, reply to New York Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association (March 21, 1864); in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 7, p. 259.
  • From labor there shall come forth rest.
  • Adam was created righteous, acceptable, and without sin. He had no need from his labor in the garden to be made righteous and acceptable to God. Rather, the Lord gave Adam work in order to cultivate and protect the garden. This would have been the freest of all works because they were done simply to please God and not to obtain righteousness. … The works of the person who trusts God are to be understood in a similar manner. Through faith we are restored to paradise and created anew. We have no need of works in order to be righteous; however, in order to avoid idleness and so that the body might be cared for an disciplined, works are done freely to please God.
    • Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), M. Tranvik, trans. (Minneapolis: 2008), pp. 73-74.
  • It is always necessary that the substance or essence of a person be good before there can be any good works and that good works follow and proceed from a person who is already good. Christ says in Matthew 7:18: “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.” ... The fruit does not make the tree good or bad but the tree itself is what determines the nature of the fruit. In the same way, a person first must be good or bad before doing a good or bad work.
    • Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), M. Tranvik, trans. (Minneapolis: 2008), pp. 74-75.
  • Many have been deceived by outward appearances and have proceeded to write and teach about good works and how they justify without even mentioning faith. … Wearying themselves with many works, they never come to righteousness.
    • Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), M. Tranvik, trans. (Minneapolis: 2008), p. 75.
99 hundreths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked. ~ Herman Melville
It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself — a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others. ~ William Morris

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  • Tonio ... worked withdrawn out of sight and sound of the small men, for whom he felt nothing but contempt, who, whether they were poor or not, went about ostentatiously shabby or else flaunted startling cravats, all the time taking jolly good care to amuse themselves, to be artistic and charming without the smallest notion of the fact that good work comes out only under pressure of a bad life; that he who lives does not work; the one must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
    • Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger, H. Lowe-Porter, trans., modified, in Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories (1930), p. 94
  • Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, Jesus saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed Jesus.
  • The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.
    • Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Potable Karl Marx (1983), p. 134.
  • The better shaped his product, the more mis-shapen the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbaric the worker; the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.
    • Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Potable Karl Marx (1983), p. 135.
  • Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.
    • Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Potable Karl Marx (1983), p. 135.
  • What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? First, in the fact that labor is external to the worker, that is, that it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel well but unhappy, does not freely develop his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker, therefore, feels himself only outside his work, and feels beside himself in his work. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His work therefore is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that labor is shunned like the plague as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion.
    • Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Potable Karl Marx (1983), p. 136.
  • When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.
    • Karl Marx, “Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation” (1835), Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38.
  • He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must have the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday's work, lest he fall into despair; nor to-morrow's, lest he become a visionary—not that which ends with the day, which is a worldly work; nor yet that only which remains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his actions.
    Happy is the man who can recognise in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.
    Thus ought Man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible; nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it.
    • James Clerk Maxwell, Paper communicated to Frederic Farrar (1854) Æt. 23, as quoted in Lewis Campbell, William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell: With Selections from His Correspondence and Occasional Writings (1884) pp. 144-145, and in Richard Glazebrook, James Clerk Maxwell and Modern Physics (1896) pp. 39-40.
  • True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.
    • Herman Melville, in a letter to Catherine G. Lansing (5 September 1877), published in The Melville Log : A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (1951) by Jay Leyda, Vol. 2, p. 765.
  • It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most well-to-do people that all work is desirable. Most people, well-to-do or not, believe that, even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless, he is earning his livelihood by it — he is "employed," as the phrase goes; and most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is only "industrious" enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays — in the sacred cause of labour. In short, it has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself — a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others. But as to those on whom they live, I recommend them not to take it on trust, but to look into the matter a little deeper.
    • William Morris, "Useful Work vs Useless Toil" (1885); later published in Signs of Change : Seven Lectures, Delivered on Various Occasions (1896).
  • It is of the nature of man, when he is not diseased, to take pleasure in his work under certain conditions. And, yet, we must say in the teeth of the hypocritical praise of all labour, whatsoever it may be, of which I have made mention, that there is some labour which is so far from being a blessing that it is a curse; that it would be better for the community and for the worker if the latter were to fold his hands and refuse to work, and either die or let us pack him off to the workhouse or prison — which you will.
    Here, you see, are two kinds of work — one good, the other bad; one not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a burden to life.
    What is the difference between them, then ? This: one has hope in it, the other has not. It is manly to do the one kind of work, and manly also to refuse to do the other.
    • William Morris, "Useful Work vs Useless Toil" (1885); later published in Signs of Change : Seven Lectures, Delivered on Various Occasions (1896).
  • In his discussion on slavery Aristotle said that when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief workmen would not need helpers nor masters slaves. At the time he wrote, he believed that he was establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today he was in reality justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of man's interaction with his environment, if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life; and the lack of work usually means an impairment of function and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. But work in the form of unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which... the Athenians so properly despised—work in these forms is the true province of machines. Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentially... is perhaps the largest justification of the mechanical developments of the last thousand years.

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  • Early to bed,
    Early to rise,
    Work like hell —
    And advertise!
    • "Old slogan" quoted in The National Provisioner, Vol. 44 (June 1911), p. 35; this has since become misattributed to many people who might have quoted it.
  • Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion energy plan Tuesday with a heavy focus on the Green New Deal agenda... Speaking in Wilmington, Del., Biden promised a “clean energy revolution,” which he said would deliver millions of jobs... Biden detailed what he called a pro-union platform that would replace the US government’s car fleet with American-made electric vehicles... The former veep on Tuesday promised to “create millions of high-paying union jobs by building a modern infrastructure and a clean energy future” and described his vision of a US covered in 500,000 electric car charging stations and thriving factories producing green products.
  • Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
  • Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not to be the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery only if it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure.
  • I propose a new approach that will make it more attractive to go to work than to go on welfare, and will establish a nationwide minimum payment to dependent families with children. I propose that the Federal government pay a basic income to those American families who cannot care for themselves in whichever State they live. ... I propose that we make available an addition to the incomes of the "working poor," to encourage them to go on working, and to eliminate the possibility of making more from welfare than from wages.

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  • Artificial intelligence is here and it is accelerating, and you're going to have driverless cars, and you're going to have more and more automated services, and that's going to make the job of giving everybody work that is meaningful, tougher and we're going to have to be more imaginative, and the pact of change is going to require us to do more fundamental reimagining of our social and political arrangements, to protect the economic security and the dignity that comes with a job. It's not just money that a job provides; it provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose. And so we're going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income, review of our workweek, how we retrain our young people, how we make everybody an entrepreneur at some level. But we're going to have to worry about economics if we want to get democracy back on track.
  • I found it hard working really long hours when I was my own boss. The boss kept giving me the afternoon off.
Towards this fine honor of a trade converged all the finest, all the most noble sentiments—dignity, pride. ... In those days a workman did not know what it was to solicit. It is the bourgeoisie who, turning the workmen into bourgeois, have taught them to solicit. ~ Charles Péguy

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  • Low labour cost, along with flexibility in labour use, has become a key source of competitive advantage for firms. As external competition intensifies, the domestic industry has come under great pressure to restructure itself, to become more competitive and to adopt flexible policies with regard to production and labour. With a view to increasing global competitiveness, investors are moving more towards countries that either have low labour costs, or are shifting to informal employment arrangements. These changes create an entirely different political-economic environment for workers around the world. Greater international mobility of capital relative to labour puts workers from a given location at an immediate disadvantage, both in terms of bargaining power with the owners of capital (whose threat to move gains greater credibility) and with respect to the State. Thus the removal of domestic entry barriers and movement of capital to areas of cheap labour have caused intensification of domestic competition in many developing countries— especially those with surplus labour supply and those where labour is a major factor of production. This has been accentuated by potential investors citing the lack of flexibility in hiring and laying off workers as a concern, while targeting a developing country in which to invest. [...] Optimism with regard to labour as an agency of social progress has been replaced by pessimism that sees little prospect of workers acting on their own behalf.
  • All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
    • Jack Torrance played by Jack Nicholson, The Shining screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson
  • Religious people must be brought to a vivid realization of their awful guilt in sanctioning and supporting an economic system that is the direct antithesis of their religious ideals.
  • Pride in one’s work carries with it a determination to accept the demands imposed by that work: in the case of philosophy to follow the argument where it leads, in the case of history to discover what actually happened, in the case of literature to explore to its depths a particular theme. In consequence, this sort of pride demands freedom: it has to be laid low in any authoritarian State. The historian, in such a system, has to conform to official interpretations of the past, the philosopher to dogmas, the writer to stereotypes of human action, the craftsman to “production-schedules.” More subtly, attempts are made to lay pride low in a consumer’s society: the film-director, the novelist, the craftsman are called upon to produce “what will sell” at whatever cost to their pride in workmanship.
  • A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
  • These bygone workmen did not serve, they worked. They had an absolute honor, which is honor proper. A chair rung had to be well made. That was an understood thing. That was the first thing. It wasn’t that the chair rung had to be well made for the salary or on account of the salary. It wasn’t that it was well made for the boss, nor for connoisseurs, nor for the boss’ clients. It had to be well made itself, in itself, for itself, in its very self. A tradition coming, springing from deep within the race, a history, an absolute, an honor, demanded that this chair rung be well made. Every part of the chair which could not be seen was just as perfectly made as the parts which could be seen. The was the selfsame principal of cathedrals. … There was no question of being seen or of not being seen. It was the innate being of work which needed to be well done.
    • Charles Péguy, Basic Verities, A. & J. Green, trans. (New York: 1943), pp. 82-85
  • Towards this fine honor of a trade converged all the finest, all the most noble sentiments—dignity, pride. Never ask anything of anyone, they used to say. … In those days a workman did not know what it was to solicit. It is the bourgeoisie who, turning the workmen into bourgeois, have taught them to solicit.
    • Charles Péguy, Basic Verities, A. & J. Green, trans. (New York: 1943), p. 83.
  • Don't sacrifice your life to work and ideals. The most important things in life are human relations. I found that out too late.
  • The man who by his labour gets
       His bread, in independent state,
    Who never begs, and seldom eats,
       Himself can fix or change his fate.
  • The trouble with Opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work.
  • To depend on another's nod for a livelihood, is a sad destiny.
Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine. ~ Nikola Tesla
We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. ~ Oscar Wilde
It is amazing what can be accomplished when nobody cares about who gets the credit. ~ Robert Yates
Let us reserve our limited creativity for functions that will not be taken care of if we do not to it. ~ John Howard Yoder
The land belongs to those who work it with their hands. ~ Emiliano Zapata

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Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery. ~ Bertrand Russell
It is clear that mechanistic, biologically unsatisfying work is a product of the widespread mechanistic view of life and the machine civilization. Can the biologic function of work be reconciled with the social function of work? This is possible, but firmly entrenched ideas and institutions must be radically corrected first.
The craftsman of the nineteenth century still had a full relationship to the product of his work. But when, as in a Ford factory, a worker has to perform one and the same manipulation year in and year out, always working on one detail and never the product as a whole, it is out of the question to speak of satisfying work. The specialized and mechanized division of labour, together with the system of paid labour in general, produce the effect that the working man has no relationship to the machine. ~ Wilhelm Reich
  • Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil.
  • Work is the basis of man’s social existence. This is stressed by every social theory. In this respect, however, the problem is not that work is the basis of human existence. The problem relates to the nature of work: Is it in opposition to or in harmony with the biologic needs of masses of people? Marx’s economic theory proved that everything that is produced in the way of economic values comes about through the expenditure of man’s living working power, and not through the expenditure of dead material.
  • It is clear that mechanistic, biologically unsatisfying work is a product of the widespread mechanistic view of life and the machine civilization. Can the biologic function of work be reconciled with the social function of work? This is possible, but firmly entrenched ideas and institutions must be radically corrected first.
    The craftsman of the nineteenth century still had a full relationship to the product of his work. But when, as in a Ford factory, a worker has to perform one and the same manipulation year in and year out, always working on one detail and never the product as a whole, it is out of the question to speak of satisfying work. The specialized and mechanized division of labour, together with the system of paid labour in general, produce the effect that the working man has no relationship to the machine.
    • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), ch. 10, p. 287.
  • Only when one is objectively and intimately related to one’s work is one capable of comprehending just how destructive the dictatorial and formal democratic forms of work are, not only for work itself but also for the pleasure of work. When a man takes pleasure in his work, we call his relationship to it ‘libidinous’. Since work and sexuality (in both the strict and broad senses of the word) are intimately interwoven, man’s relationship to work is also a question of the sex-economy of masses of people. The hygiene of the work process is dependent upon the way masses of people use and gratify their biologic energy. Work and sexuality derive from the same biologic energy.
    • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), ch. 10, p. 293.
  • The relationship between the worker’s sexual life and the performance of his work is of decisive importance. It is not as if work diverted sexual energy from gratification, so that the more one worked the less need one would have for sexual gratification. The opposite of this is the case: The more gratifying one’s sexual life is, the more fulfilling and pleasurable is one ’s work, if all external conditions are fulfilled. Gratified sexual energy is spontaneously converted into an interest in work and an urge for activity. In contrast to this, one’s work is disturbed in various ways if one’s sexual need is not gratified and is suppressed. Hence, a basic principle of the work hygiene of a work-democratic society is: It is necessary to establish not only the best external conditions of work, but also to create the inner biologic preconditions to allow the fullest unfolding of the biologic urge for activity. Hence, the safeguarding of a completely satisfying sexual life for the working masses is the most important precondition of pleasurable work. In any society the degree to which work kills the joy of life, the degree to which it is represented as a duty (whether to a ‘fatherland’, the ‘proletariat’, the ‘nation’ or whatever other names these illusions may have), is a sure yardstick on which to measure the anti-democratic character of the ruling class of this society.
    • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), ch. 10, p. 295.
  • The working men and women who think and act in a work-democratic way do not come out against the politician. It is not his fault or his intention that the practical result of his work exposes the illusionary and irrational character of politics. Those who are engaged in practical work, regardless what field they are in, are intensely concerned with practical tasks in the improvement of life. Those who are engaged in practical work are not against one thing or another. It is only the politician who, having no practical tasks is always against and never for something. Politics in general is characterized by this ‘being against’ one thing or another. That which is productive in a practical way is not accomplished by politicians, but by working men and women, whether it is in accord with the politicians’ ideologies or not.
    • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), ch. 11, p. 368.
  • For centuries on end it has been precisely vitally necessary work that the political ideology of the ruling but nonworking classes has depreciated. On the other hand, it has represented non-work as a sign of noble blood. All socialist ideologies reacted to this appraisal with a mechanistic and rigid reversal of valuations. The socialists conceived of ‘work’ as relating solely to those activities that had been looked down upon in feudalism, i.e., essentially to manual labour; whereas the activity of the ruling classes was represented as non-work. To be sure, this mechanical reversal of ideologic valuations was wholly in keeping with the political concept of the two economically and personally sharply demarcated social classes, the ruling and the ruled. From a purely economic point of view, society could indeed be divided into ‘those who possessed capital’ and ‘those who possessed the commodity, working power’ . From the point of view of bio-sociology, however, there could be no clear-cut division between one class and another, neither ideologically nor psychologically, and certainly not on the basis of work. The discovery of the fact that the ideology of a group of people does not necessarily have to coincide with its economic situation, indeed, that economic and ideologic situation are often sharply opposed to one another, enabled us to understand the fascist movement, which had remained uncomprehended until then. In 1930 it became dear that there is a ‘cleavage’ between ideology and economy, and that the ideology of a certain class can develop into a social force, a social force that is not confined to that one class.
    • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), ch. 11, p. 383
  • For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
  • When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly.
  • Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
  • Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
  • A narcissist, for example, inspired by the homage paid to great painters, may become an art student; but, as painting is for him a mere means to an end, the technique never becomes interesting … The result is failure and disappointment, with ridicule instead of the expected adulation. … All serious success in work depends upon some genuine interest. … Consequently, the man whose sole concern with the world is that is shall admire him is not likely to achieve his object.

S

[edit]
You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards, so now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod. ~ Solon of Athens
The work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture. ~ John Lancaster Spalding
  • I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar.
    I ask you to come through and show me where you're pouring out the blood of your life.
    • Carl Sandburg, "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter", Chicago Poems (1916), p. 63.
  • What would you do if your country's welfare depended on labor? When a ship is in a storm it requires one captain.
    • Fritz Sauckel, To Leon Goldensohn, February 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History (2004), p. 209.
  • When I was young I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work.
    • George Bernard Shaw, as quoted in Appropriate Technology : A Focus for the Nineties (1991) by Robert William Stevens.
  • Nobody would work for starvation wages if he were not in a situation in which he preferred such wages to not working at all.
  • Have you beheld a man skillful in his work? Before kings is where he will station himself; he will not station himself before commonplace men.
  • You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,
    So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.
  • We have lost the old love of work, of work which kept itself company, which was fair weather and music in the heart, which found its reward in the doing, craving neither the flattery of vulgar eyes nor the gold of vulgar men.
  • The work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture.
  • Work is valued by the social value of the worker.
  • The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get running
It's the best years of your life they want to steal.
  • I just don't understand the world's unhealthy obsession with work. Its all about vanity anyway. Ooh, look how hard I worked! And what a good work I did. Well screw you, workie. Get lost. Shut up. We're trying to listen to records here.

T

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  • I suddenly felt insecure and feared becoming an employee of some firm that would turn me into a corporate slave with "work ethics" (whenever I hear the word work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity).
    • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001) Seven: The Problem of Induction | Sir Karl's Promoting Agent
  • Laborare est orare. [To work is to pray.] By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material necessity.
    • R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), p. 242
  • I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.
    • Nikola Tesla, in "My Inventions" first published in Electrical Experimenter magazine (1919); republished as My Inventions : The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (1983).
  • Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
    • Nikola Tesla, on patent controversies regarding the invention of Radio and other things, as quoted in "A Visit to Nikola Tesla" by Dragislav L. Petkovic in Politika (April 1927); as quoted in Tesla, Master of Lightning (1999) by Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, p. 73 ISBN 0760710058  ; also in Tesla: Man Out of Time (2001) by Margaret Cheney, p. 230 ISBN 0743215362
  • The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.
    • Nikola Tesla, "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World", Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934).
  • This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! ... It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. ... If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, … it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
  • Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,—a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.
  • It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
  • Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor.

V

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  • Il est bien malaisé (puisqu’il faut enfin m’expliquer) d’ôter à des insensés des chaînes qu’ils révèrent.
    • It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
      • Voltaire, Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Troisième Entretien

W

[edit]
  • The bourgeoisie first betrayed society through capitalism and finance, and now labor betrays it by embracing a scheme of things which sees profit only, not duty and honor, in work. This view will seem hopelessly unrealistic to those who do not admit that sentiment toward the whole is the only ultimate means of measuring value.
  • The idea that work is something apportioned out by men leaves people discontent with their portion and dubious about whether work is a good thing at all. … The ancient injunction to labor fades when we regard our work as cut out for us by men, who, by present dogma, are no better than ourselves. That curious modern hypostatization “service” is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation. It tries to secure subordination by hypothesizing something larger than the self, which turns out, however, to be only a multitude of selfish selves. The familiar change from quality to quantity may again be noted; one serves not the higher part of the self (this entails hierarchy) … but merely consumer demand. And who admires those at the top of a hierarchy of consumption? Man as a consuming animal is thus seen to be not enough.
  • Labor in this country is independent and proud. It has not to ask the patronage of capital, but capital solicits the aid of labor.
    • Daniel Webster, A discourse, delivered at Plymouth, December 22, 1820. In commemoration of the first settlement of New-England.
  • They are usually denominated labor-saving machines, but it would be more just to call them labor-doing machines.
    • Daniel Webster, remarks in the Senate (March 12, 1838); The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster (1903), vol. 8, p. 177.
  • America has lost more than 12 million jobs in the last six months. An estimated 12 million people have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance during the worst pandemic in a century. Tens of millions report not having enough to eat. But one month ago, tens of millions of unemployed Americans lost... a $600 weekly federal unemployment insurance benefit that Congress failed to renew... How can this happen in a democracy? This is a question that everyone who works for a living... might want to consider on this Labor Day... If the facts of this political disaster were more widely known and understood, Republicans could lose not only the presidency but also the Senate in November. After all, millions of unemployed Republicans lost most of their income as a result of what their political party...did... Republican senators repeatedly expressed worries that the unemployment benefits created a "disincentive to work." But economists have found no evidence of this; on the contrary, millions of workers who were receiving these benefits returned to work in May through July, and there are more than 11 million more workers and there are more than 11 million more workers unemployed than there are job openings.
  • Paul's ... no-work-no-eat doctrine was directed by him only against the poor. All around him were the rich, virginally innocent of toil, and yet who were gorged to the gullet.
  • We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
    • Oscar Wilde, Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist, pt. 2 (1891)

Y

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  • If you care about children, then [UBI] is the best way to make household and families stronger; if you care about women and economic empowerment, this is a way to make it so that women can walk away from abusive or exploitative employers; if you care about communities of color, they would benefit much more proportionally from a thousand dollars a month than other communities, because they have lower access to various jobs and opportunities. This is the way that we can reform society in a way that actually serves all of our goals, our collective goals. And at least one study showed that if you would alleviate child poverty, you would increase GDP by 700 billion dollars, because of better health outcomes, educational outcomes, higher worker productivity, better mental health... We have to start investing in our people, intrinsically.
  • We have to say "we are the citizens and owners and stakeholders of this society, we can vote ourselves a dividend, and it's up to us to build an economy that serves us, because... this economy is not designed to serve human beings. It is designed to serve capital efficiency. And for a long time, that also served human beings, but increasingly it's going to be that having lots of humans working for a company is irrelevant, or even negative, for corporate success. And we can see this by the fact that 94% of the new jobs created since 2005 to 2015, were gig economy, temp and contractor jobs, because the employer said "you know what? I'd rather not have a full-time employee, I'd rather not pay health care benefits", and that's why so many Americans right now are in that position. So we have to start recognizing that the economy is changing for good, and that it's up to us, the citizens of this country, to rewrite the rules the economy to serve us. We have to make the market serve us, and not have us all be slaves to the market, because the market is not going to care one whit about us increasingly over time.
  • It is amazing what can be accomplished when nobody cares about who gets the credit.
    • Robert Yates, as quoted in The Team Selling Solution : Creating and Managing Teams That Win (2003) by Steve Waterhouse, p. 51.
  • Jesus once said that the dead should let to bury the dead (Luke 9:60). This shows no disrespect for the dead. It shows an awareness that there are some functions in society that will be well taken care of without Christians investing their creativity in those functions. Someone else, in meeting such needs, can make a stable living. Burying the dead is still one of the businesses in which you can make a stable living. There are other such services that we can count on society handling by itself. Leadership in government and business are among these. Let us reserve our limited creativity for functions that will not be taken care of if we do not to it.

Z

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  • La tierra es de quien la trabaja con sus manos.
    • The land belongs to those who work it with their hands.
      • Emiliano Zapata, quoted as a slogan of the revolutionaries in Shirt-Sleeve Diplomat (1947) Vol. 5, p. 199, by Josephus Daniels, and specifically attributed to Zapata by Ángel Zúñiga in 1998, as quoted in Mexican Social Movements and the Transition to Democracy (2005), by John Stolle-McAllister

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

[edit]
Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 907-11.
  • Labour in vain; or coals to Newcastle.
    • Anon. In a sermon to the people of Queen-Hith. Advertised in the Daily Courant, Oct. 6, 1709. Published in Paternoster Row, London. "Coals to Newcastle," or "from Newcastle," found in Heywood—If you Know Not Me, Part II. (1606). Gaunt—Bills of Mortality. (1661). Middleton—Phœnix, Act I, scene 5. R. Thoresby—Correspondence. Letter June 29, 1682. Owls to Athens. (Athenian coins were stamped with the owl.) Aristophanes—Aves. 301. Diogenes Laertius—Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Plato, XXXII. You are importing pepper into Hindostan. From the Bustan of Sadi.
  • When Adam dolve, and Eve span,
    Who was then the gentleman?
    • Lines used by John Ball in Wat Tyler's Rebellion. See Hume, History of England, Volume I, Chapter XVII. Note 8. So Adam reutte, und Eva span, Wer war da ein eddelman? (Old German saying).
  • Qui orat et laborat, cor levat ad Deum cum manibus.
    • He who prays and labours lifts his heart to God with his hands.
    • St. Bernard, Ad sororem. A similar expression is found in the works of Gregory the Great—Moral in Libr. Job, Book XVIII. Also in Pseudo-Hieron, in Jerem., Thren. III. 41. See also "What worship, for example, is there not in mere washing!" Carlyle—Past and Present, Chapter XV., referring to "Work is prayer".
  • Tools were made and born were hands,
    Every understands.
  • Hâtez-vous lentement; et, sans perdre courage,
    Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage.
    • Hasten slowly, and without losing heart, put your work twenty times upon the anvil.
    • Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, L'Art Poétique (1674), I, 171.
  • The dog that trots about finds a bone.
    • George Borrow, Bible in Spain, Chapter XLVII. (Cited as a gipsy saying).
  • The best verse hasn't been rhymed yet,
    The best house hasn't been planned,
    The highest peak hasn't been climbed yet,
    The mightiest rivers aren't spanned;
    Don't worry and fret, faint-hearted,
    The chances have just begun
    For the best jobs haven't been started,
    The best work hasn't been done.
  • Not all the labor of the earth
    Is done by hardened hands.
  • And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
  • It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
  • Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.
  • All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.
  • With hand on the spade and heart in the sky
    Dress the ground and till it;
    Turn in the little seed, brown and dry,
    Turn out the golden millet.
    Work, and your house shall be duly fed:
    Work, and rest shall be won;
    I hold that a man had better be dead
    Than alive when his work is done.
  • Earned with the sweat of my brows.
  • Quanto mas que cada uno es hijo de sus obras.
    • The rather since every man is the son of his own works.
    • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605-15), Book I, Chapter 4.
  • Labor is discovered to be the grand conqueror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles.
  • Each natural agent works but to this end,—
    To render that it works on like itself.
  • Ther n' is no werkman whatever he be,
    That may both werken wel and hastily.
    This wol be done at leisure parfitly.
  • Nowher so besy a man as he ther was,
    And yet he semed bisier than he was.
  • Let us take to our hearts a lesson—
    No lesson could braver be—
    From the ways of the tapestry weavers
    On the other side of the sea.
  • Penelopæ telam retexens.
    • Unravelling the web of Penelope.
    • Cicero, Acad. Quæst, Book IV. 29. 95.
  • Vulgo enim dicitur, Jucundi acti labores: nec male Euripides: concludam, si potero, Latine: Græcum enim hunc versum nostis omnes: Suavis laborum est præteritorum memoria.
    • It is generally said, "Past labors are pleasant," Euripides says, for you all know the Greek verse, "The recollection of past labors is pleasant."
    • Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, II. 32.
  • A truly American sentiment recognises the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
  • All Nature seems at work, slugs leave their lair—
    The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
    And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
    Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
    And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
    Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
  • Their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.
  • Each one’s work will become obvious. For the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire; the fire will test the quality of each one’s work.
  • Work thou for pleasure—paint or sing or carve
    The thing thou lovest, though the body starve—
    Who works for glory misses oft the goal;
    Who works for money coins his very soul.
    Work for the work's sake, then, and it may be
    That these things shall be added unto thee.
  • When admirals extoll'd for standing still,
    Of doing nothing with a deal of skill.
  • Better to wear out than to rust out.
    • Bishop Cumberland, to one who urged him not to wear himself out with work. See Horne, Sermon on the Duty of Contending for the Truth. Boswell, Tour to the Hebrides, p. 18. Note. Said by George Whitefield, according to Southey, Life of Wesley, II, p. 170. (Ed. 1858).
  • Honest labour bears a lovely face.
  • The Lord had a job for me, but I had so much to do,
    I said, "You get somebody else—or wait till I get through."
    I don't know how the Lord came out, but He seemed to get along:
    But I felt kinda sneakin' like, 'cause I know'd I done Him wrong.
    One day I needed the Lord—needed Him myself—needed Him right away,
    And He never answered me at all, but I could hear Him say
    Down in my accusin' heart, "Nigger, I'se got too much to do,
    You get somebody else or wait till I get through."
  • All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.
  • 'Tis toil's reward, that sweetens industry,
    As love inspires with strength the enraptur'd thrush.
  • A woman's work, grave sirs, is never done.
    • Mr. Eusden, Poem, Spoken at a Cambridge Commencement.
  • Labour itself is but a sorrowful song,
    The protest of the weak against the strong.
  • Chacun son métier;
    Les vaches seront bien gardées.
    • Each one to his own trade; then would the cows be well cared for.
    • Florian, Le Vacher et le Garde-chasse.
  • A ploughman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on his knees.
  • "Men work together," I told him from the heart,
    "Whether they work together or apart."
  • It is so far from being needless pains, that it may bring considerable profit, to carry Charcoals to Newcastle.
    • Thomas Fuller, Pisgah, Sight of Palestine (Ed. 1650), p. 128. Worthies, p. 302. (Ed. 1661).
  • In every rank, or great or small,
    'Tis industry supports us all.
    • John Gay, Man, Cat, Dog, and Fly, line 63.
  • In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
  • For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.
  • So eine Arbeit wird eigentlich nie fertig; man muss sie für fertig erklären, wenn man nach Zeit und Umstand das Möglichste getan hat.
    • Properly speaking, such work is never finished; one must declare it so when, according to time and circumstances, one has done one's best.
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise (March 16, 1787).
  • How blest is he who crowns in shades like these,
    A youth of labour with an age of ease.
  • He that well his warke beginneth
    The rather a good ende he winneth.
  • Vitam perdidi laboricose agendo.
    • I have spent my life laboriously doing nothing.
    • Quoted by Grotius on his death bed.
  • A warke it ys as easie to be done
    As tys to saye Jacke! robys on.
    • James Halliwell-Phillipps, Archæological Dictionary. Quoted from an old Play. See Grose—Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar tongue. Hudson, the English singer, made popular the refrain, "Before ye could cry 'Jack Robinson.'"
  • Joy to the Toiler!—him that tills
    The fields with Plenty crowned;
    Him with the woodman's axe that thrills
    The wilderness profound.
  • If little labour, little are our gaines:
    Man's fortunes are according to his paines.
  • Haste makes waste.
  • The "value" or "worth" of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power.
  • To labour is the lot of man below;
    And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.
    • Homer, The Iliad, Book X, line 78. Pope's translation.
  • Light is the task when many share the toil.
    • Homer, The Iliad, Book XII, line 493. Bryant's translation.
  • Our fruitless labours mourn,
    And only rich in barren fame return.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book X, line 46. Pope's translation.
  • The fiction pleased; our generous train complies,
    Nor fraud mistrusts in virtue's fair disguise.
    The work she plyed, but, studious of delay,
    Each following night reversed the toils of day.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book XXIV, line 164. Pope's translation.
  • When Darby saw the setting sun
    He swung his scythe, and home he run,
    Sat down, drank off his quart and said,
    "My work is done, I'll go to bed."
    "My work is done!" retorted Joan,
    "My work is done! Your constant tone,
    But hapless woman ne'er can say
    'My work is done' till judgment day."
  • With fingers weary and worn,
    With eyelids heavy and red,
    A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
    Plying her needle and thread.
  • Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metam
    Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit.
    • He who would reach the desired goal must, while a boy, suffer and labor much and bear both heat and cold.
    • Horace, Ars Poetica (18 BC), CCCCXII.
  • O laborum
    Dulce lenimen.
    • O sweet solace of labors.
    • Horace, Carmina, I. 32. 14.
  • In silvam ligna ferre.
    • To carry timber into the wood.
    • Horace, Satires, I. 10. 24.
  • Facito aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum.
    • Keep doing some kind of work, that the devil may always find you employed.
    • St. Jerome.
  • I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
  • Cur quæris quietem, quam natus sis ad laborem?
    • Why seekest thou rest, since thou art born to labor?
    • Thomas á Kempis, De Imitatione Christi, II. 10. 1.
  • Tho' we earn our bread, Tom,
    By the dirty pen,
    What we can we will be,
    Honest Englishmen.
    Do the work that's nearest
    Though it's dull at whiles,
    Helping, when we meet them,
    Lame dogs over stiles.
    • Charles Kingsley, Letter. To Thomas Hughes (1856), inviting Hughes and Tom Taylor to go fishing. See Memoirs of Kingsley, by his wife, Chapter XV.
  • For men must work and women must weep,
    And the sooner it's over the sooner to sleep,
    And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.
  • But till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen,
    We will work for ourself and a woman, for ever and ever, Amen.
  • The gull shall whistle in his wake, the blind wave break in fire.
    He shall fulfill God's utmost will, unknowing His desire,
    And he shall see old planets pass and alien stars arise,
    And give the gale his reckless sail in shadow of new skies.
    Strong lust of gear shall drive him out and hunger arm his hand,
    To wring his food from a desert nude, his foothold from the sand.
    • Rudyard Kipling, The Fareloper (Interloper). Pub. in Century Magazine, April, 1909. First pub. in London Daily Telegraph, Jan. 1, 1909. Title given as Vortrekker in his Songs From Books.
  • And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
    And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame;
    But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
    Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things as They Are!
  • And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessed—they know the angels are on their side;
    They know in them is the Grace confessed, and for them are the Mercies multiplied;
    They sit at the Feet, they hear the Word, they see how truly the Promise runs;
    They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and—the Lord He lays it on Martha's Sons!
  • Who first invented work, and bound the free
    And holyday-rejoicing spirit down * * *
    To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood? * * *
    Sabbathless Satan!
  • The finest eloquence is that which gets things done; the worst is that which delays them.
  • Unemployment, with its injustice for the man who seeks and thirsts for employment, who begs for labour and cannot get it, and who is punished for failure he is not responsible for by the starvation of his children—that torture is something that private enterprise ought to remedy for its own sake.
  • The heights by great men reached and kept
    Were not attained by sudden flight,
    But they, while l heir companions slept,
    Were toiling upward in the night.
  • Taste the joy
    That springs from labor.
    • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Masque of Pandora, Part VI. In the Garden. "From labor there shall come forth rest."--Longfellow—To a Child, line 162.
  • Never idle a moment, but thrifty and thoughtful of others.
  • 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;
    And blessed are the horny hands of toil!
    • James Russell Lowell, A Glance Behind the Curtain, line 202. "Horny-handed sons of toil." Popularized by Denis Kearney (Big Denny), of San Francisco.
  • Labor est etiam ipsa voluptas.
  • How bething the, gentliman,
    How Adam dalf, and Eve span.
    • Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century. British Museum.
  • Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
    Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
    The emptiness of ages in his face,
    And on his back the burden of the world.
    • Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe. Written after seeing Millet's picture "Angelus".
  • Divisum sic breve fiet opus.
    • Work divided is in that manner shortened.
    • Martial, Epigrams (c. 80-104 AD), Book IV. 83. 8.
  • Why do strong arms fatigue themselves with frivolous dumb-bells? To dig a vineyard is a worthier exercise for men.
    • Martial, Epigrams (c. 80-104 AD), Book XIV, Epigram 49.
  • God be thank'd that the dead have left still
    Good undone for the living to do—
    Still some aim for the heart and the will
    And the soul of a man to pursue.
  • But now my task is smoothly done,
    I can fly, or I can run.
  • I am of nothing and to nothing tend,
    On earth I nothing have and nothing claim,
    Man's noblest works must have one common end,
    And nothing crown the tablet of his name.
    • Thomas Moore, Ode upon Nothing. Appeared in Saturday Magazine about 1836. Not in Collected Works.
  • Lo! all life this truth declares,
    Laborare est orare;
    And the whole earth rings with prayers.
  • Has it ever been really noted to what extent a genuinely religious life … requires a leisure class, or half-leisure—I mean leisure with a good conscience, from way back, by blood, to which the aristocratic feeling that work disgraces is not altogether alien—the feeling that it makes soul and body common. And that consequently our modern, noisy, time-consuming industriousness, proud of itself, stupidly proud, educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for “unbelief.”
    • Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, W. Kauffman, trans. (New York: 1992), § 58.
  • Labor is life! 'Tis the still water faileth;
    Idleness ever despaireth, bewaileth;
    Keep the watch wound, for the dark rust assaileth.
  • Labor is rest—from the sorrows that greet us;
    Rest from all petty vexations that meet us,
    Rest from sin-promptings that ever entreat us,
    Rest from the world-sirens that hire us to ill.
    Work—and pure slumbers shall wait on thy pillow;
    Work—thou shalt ride over Care's coming billow;
    Lie not down wearied 'neath Woe's weeping willow!
    Work with a stout heart and resolute will!
  • The uselessness of men above sixty years of age and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, in political, and in professional life, if as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.
    • William Osler, address, at Johns Hopkins University (Feb. 22, 1905).
  • Study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
    • William Osler. The statement made by him which gave rise to the report that he had advised chloroform after sixty. Denied by him in Medical Record (March 4, 1905).
  • Dum vires annique sinunt, tolerate labores.
    Jam veniet tacito curva senecta pede.
    • While strength and years permit, endure labor; soon bent old age will come with silent foot.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, II. 669.
  • And all labour without any play, boys,
    Makes Jack a dull boy in the end.
  • Many hands make light work.
    • William Patten[disambiguation needed]. Expedition into Scotland (1547). In Arber's Reprint of 1880.
  • Grex venalium.
    • The herd of hirelings. (A venal pack.)
    • Plautus, Cistellaria, IV. 2. 67.
  • Oleum et operam perdidi.
    • I have lost my oil and my labor. (Labored in vain.)
    • Plautus, Pœnulus, I. 2. 119.
  • Ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of beauty.
  • Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.
    • Psalms. CIV. 23.
  • When Adam dalfe and Eve spane
    So spire if thou may spede,
    Where was then the pride of man,
    That nowe merres his mede?
  • The man who by his labour gets
    His bread, in independent state,
    Who never begs, and seldom eats,
    Himself can fix or change his fate.
  • Der Mohr hat seine Arbeit gethan, der Mohr kann gehen.
  • Hard toil can roughen form and face,
    And want can quench the eye's bright grace.
  • Why, universal plodding poisons up
    The nimble spirits in the arteries,
    As motion and long-during action tires
    The sinewy vigour of the traveller.
  • What work's, my countrymen, in hand? where go you
    With bats and clubs? The matter? speak, I pray you.
  • 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.
  • I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero…. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.
  • A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.
  • Many faint with toil,
    That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.
  • How many a rustic Milton has passed by,
    Stifling the speechless longings of his heart,
    In unremitting drudgery and care!
    How many a vulgar Cato has compelled
    His energies, no longer tameless then,
    To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail!
  • Nothing can be done at once hastily and prudently.
  • Ne laterum laves.
    • Do not wash bricks. (Waste your labor).
    • Terence, Phormio, I, IV. 9. A Greek proverb.
  • With starving labor pampering idle waste;
    To tear at pleasure the defected land.
  • The labourer is worthy of his reward.
  • A workman that needeth not to be ashamed.
  • Clamorous pauperism feasteth
    While honest Labor, pining, hideth his sharp ribs.
  • Heaven is blessed with perfect rest but the blessing of earth is toil.
  • Labor omnia vincit improbus.
    • Stubborn labor conquers everything.
    • Virgil, Georgics (c. 29 BC), I. 145.
  • Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice and need.
    • Voltaire,Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) Chapter 30. Conclusion.
  • Too long, that some may rest,
    Tired millions toil unblest.
  • But when dread Sloth, the Mother of Doom, steals in,
    And reigns where Labour's glory was to serve,
    Then is the day of crumbling not far off.
  • In books, or work, or healthful play.
  • Labor in this country is independent and proud. It has not to ask the patronage of capital, but capital solicits the aid of labor.
  • There will be little drudgery in this better ordered world. Natural power harnessed in machines will be the general drudge. What drudgery is inevitable will be done as a service and duty for a few years or months out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the whole life of anyone.
  • Ah, little recks the laborer,
    How near his work is holding him to God,
    The loving Laborer through space and time.
  • Thine to work as well as pray,
    Clearing thorny wrongs away;
    Plucking up the weeds of sin,
    Letting heaven's warm sunshine in.
  • Ah vitam perdidi operse nihil agendo.
    • Ah, my life is lost in laboriously doing nothing.
    • Josiah Woodward, Fair Warnings to a Careless World, p. 97. Ed. 1736, quoting Merick Casaubon.

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

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  • The day is short, the labor long, the workers are idle, and reward is great, and the Master is urgent.
    • Aboth, 2:15, saying of Rabbi Tarfon. Pirkay Avot, often known in English as the "Chapters of the Fathers", is the best known of the books of the Mishnah, first part of the Talmud. Translations vary; that above is from A Treasury of Jewish Quotations, ed. Joseph L. Baron, p. 277 (1956).
  • Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
    • Attributed to Sir James Matthew Barrie, The International Encyclopedia of Quotations, comp. John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels, and Thomas C. Jones, p. 781 (1978). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.
    • Thomas Carlyle, inaugural address as rector of the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, April 2, 1866.—Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 6 (vol. 29 of The Works of Thomas Carlyle), p. 455 (1899, reprinted 1969).
  • Do the day's work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a stand-patter, but don't be a stand-patter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don't be a demagogue. Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don't hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.
    • Calvin Coolidge, speech to the Massachusetts state Senate on being elected its president, Boston, Massachusetts, January 7, 1914.—Coolidge, Have Faith in Massachusetts, p. 7–8 (1919).
  • Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.
    • Eric Hoffer, "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer", Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely,'" The New York Times Magazine, April 25, 1971, p. 55.
  • If you work for a man, in heaven's name work for him!
    If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him—speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution he represents.
    I think if I worked for a man I would work for him. I would not work for him a part of the time, and the rest of the time work against him. I would give an undivided service or none.
    If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
    • Elbert Hubbard, "Get Out or Get in Line", Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard, p. 59–60 (1928).
  • In the Great Society, work shall be an outlet for man's interests and desires. Each individual shall have full opportunity to use his capacities in employment which satisfies personally and contributes generally to the quality of the Nation's life.
    • Lyndon B. Johnson, Manpower Report of the President, March 5, 1965. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, book 1, p. 262.
  • I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
    • Attributed to Helen Keller, Charles L. Wallis, The Treasure Chest, p. 240 (1983). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • As good play for nothing, you know, as work for nothing.
    • Sir Walter Scott, letter to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, December 30, 1808.—John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 3, p. 144 (1902, reprinted 1983). Another use of this proverb was attributed, in an obituary, to [[Sir Alexander Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice of England. "He subsequently acquired a large practice in London in railway and election cases. Although he did his best for his clients, he was careful that they should do their duty by him, and the story is told that on one occasion, when an election committee met, Mr. Cockburn, the counsel for one of the parties, was absent because his fee had not accompanied the brief and the only message left was that he had gone to the Derby, with the remark that 'a man might as well play for nothing as work for nothing.'" Canada Law Journal, January 1, 1881, p. 11.
  • You must obey this now for a Law, that he that will not worke shall not eate (except by sicknesse he be disabled:) for the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers.
    • Captain John Smith, advice to his company when he was governor of Jamestown Colony, Virginia, 1608.—Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England & The Summer Isles, vol. 1, chapter 10, p. 174 (1907). The preceding paragraph notes that "six houres each day was spent in worke, the rest in Pastime and merry exercises, but the untowardnesse of the greatest number caused the President [to] advise as followeth".
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Quotes reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 164-165.
  • The power of arbitrarily dismissing those in one's employ, is a power exercised in a great degree over a vast number of persons in this country, without their having any redress at law. Put the case of a day labourer or ordinary servant. You may refuse to give him a character, and he has no redress. If you give him a false character, he has the means of redress, but that is of a very different kind. And this is the law of the land.
    • Shadwell, V.-C, Ranger v. Great Western Rail. Co. (1838), 2 Jur. (0. S.) 789.
  • The possession of the servant is the possession of the master.
    • Hide, C.J., King v. Burgess (1663), Ray. (Sir Thos.) Rep. 85.
  • Apprentices and servants are characters perfectly distinct: the one receives instruction, the other a stipulated price for his labour.
    • Lord Kenyon, C.J., The King v. Inhabitants of St. Paul's, Bedford (1797), 6 T. R. 454.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

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Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

  • 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.
  • Let parents who hate their offspring rear them to hate labor, and to inherit riches; and before long they will be stung by every vice, racked by its poison, and damned by its penalty.
  • Blessed is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. Know thy work, and do it; and work at it like Hercules. One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
  • Labor is sweet, for Thou hast toiled,
    And care is light, for Thou hast cared;
    Let not our works with self be soiled,
    Nor in unsimple ways ensnared.
    Through life's long day and death's dark night,
    O gentle Jesus! be our light.
  • No man is base who does a true work; for true action is the highest being. No man is miserable that does a true work; for right action is the highest happiness. No man is isolated that does a true work; for useful action is the highest harmony — it is the highest harmony with nature and with souls — it is living association with men — and it is practical fellowship with God.
  • Man must work. That is certain as the sun. But he may work grudgingly, or he may work gratefully; he may work as a man, or he may work as a machine. He cannot always choose his work, but he can do it in a generous temper, and with an up-looking heart. There is no work so rude, that he may not exalt it; there is no work so impassive, that he may not breathe a soul into it; there is no work so dull, that he may not enliven it.
  • A man's labors must pass like the sunrises and sunsets of the world. The next thing, not the last, must be his care.
  • Labor is not, as some have erroneously supposed, a penal clause of the original curse. There was labor, bright, healthful, unfatiguing, in unfallen Paradise. By sin, labor became drudgery — the earth was restrained from her spontaneous fertility, and the strong arm of the husbandman was required, not to develop, but to "subdue" it. But labor in itself is noble, and is necessary for the ripe unfolding of the highest life.
  • Labor is the true alchemist that beats out in patient transmutation the baser metals into gold.
  • God does not give excellence to men but as the reward of labor.
  • Nothing is denied to well-directed labor; nothing is ever to be attained without it.
  • The virtues, like the body,become strong more by labor than by nourishment.

See also

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