Labor Quotes

List of Quotes about Labour:

• Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. (KARL MARX, Capital)
• Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more. (LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life)
• The greatest part of mankind … are given up to labor, and enslaved to the necessity of their mean condition; whose lives are worn out only in the provisions for living. (JOHN LOCKE, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding)
• Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour. (LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life)
• Labour is the root of riches. (EDWARD COUNSEL, Maxims)
• Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another. (ANATOLE FRANCE, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard)
• I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to. I wish to God that such a system prevailed all over the world. (ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, Mar. 5, 1860)
• There are some with brains and some without. It makes for a better division of labour. (BERTOLT BRECHT, Baal)
• Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations. (KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto)
• How happy he who crowns in shades like these, A youth of labour with an age of ease. (OLIVER GOLDSMITH, The Deserted Village)
• The labor unions are group efforts in the direction of democracy. Like the political efforts in the same direction, they become many times stultified and lead up blind alleys. But the effort creates power. While the economic gains are themselves important and are measures of strength, the significance of the labor union is its assertion of the manhood of labor. (HELEN MAROT, American Labor Unions)
• No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. (THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on Virginia)
• The efforts of a boy to avoid labor often sum up more than the original task. (LEWIS F. KORNS, Thoughts)
• Fame lightens labour. (EDWARD COUNSEL, Maxims)
• Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital. (HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty)
• Labour is good for a man, bracing up his energies to conquest, And without it life is dull, the man perceiving himself useless. (MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy)
• It is better to drink the wine of industry from an earthen cup, than the wine of indolence from a silver tankard. (WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs)
• Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much. (WILLIAM COWPER, Hope)
• Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back…. its triumphal march is the progress of civilization. (E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words)
• There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor. (HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit)
• There can be no general prosperity where labor has small reward. (LEWIS F. KORNS, Thoughts)
• What is earned with hard labor is eaten with pleasure. (CHINESE PROVERB)
• The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder. (T. S. ELIOT, The Rock)
• Love labour: for if thou dost not want it for food, thou mayest for physique. It is wholesome for the body, and good for the mind. It prevents the fruits of idleness, which many times come of nothing to do, and leads many to do what is worse than nothing. (WILLIAM PENN, Some Fruits of Solitude)
• Our experience tells us what is labour and recreation. (EDWARD COUNSEL, Maxims)
• When every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied…. His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another’s hands, and is used (exploited) by this other. (MAX STIRNER, The Ego and Its Own)
• Labor in all its variety, corporeal and mental, is the instituted means for the methodical development of all our powers, under the direction and control of will. (JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND, Gold-Foil)
• The hope of reward is the solace of labor. (PUBLILIUS SYRUS, The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus)
• Labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. (HENRY FORD, introduction, My Life and Work)
• Labor is still, and ever will be, the inevitable price set upon everything which is valuable. (SAMUEL SMILES, Self-Help)
• It’s certain there is no fine thing Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring. (WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “Adam’s Curse”, In the Seven Woods)
• Labour is the source of every blessing. (AESOP, “The Brazier and His Dog”, Aesop’s Fables)
• The gods give nothing really good and beautiful without labor. (XENOPHON, attributed, Day’s Collacon)
• It has been said “that he who works prays;” and certainly one of the best prayers that a working man with a large and young family can offer up is to steadily stick to his work. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, was the son of a working carpenter, and it is believed by many Theologians that our Saviour followed that trade (whatever it was in those days) until he was thirty years of age. If then God’s only Son, the right hand of the throne of heaven, the King of men, the only sinless, spotless, perfect child, youth, and man, was a labourer, IS THERE NOT DIGNITY IN LABOUR? The happiest man is the working man, and if there is any real happiness in this world it is in the neat but humble cottage, where peace and love reign, and the industrious wife is the true helpmate of the working man; and not in the palace, where the bloated aristocrat, recovering from an attack of gout or some other punishment for excess, sits, trying to kill time, with bleared eyes (and often of idiotic expression) gazing into vacancy, surrounded by all that wealth can buy or human ingenuity contrive to make him comfortable, but with all not happy. (T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH, “On the Dignity of Labour”, Short Essays)
• 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, annual message, Dec. 3, 1861)
• [Labor is] the primal curse, But softened into mercy, made the pledge Of cheerful days and nights without a groan. (WILLIAM COWPER, The Task)
• The only real riches are labor; everything else is but the sign or abuse of it. (LEMONTEY, attributed, A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association)
• Labor is what humans do, across time and across space. Labor is fundamental, crucial for satisfying our most basic needs. Labor thus provides a window for understanding all of human behavior, thought, and organization from the most macro-level of a global political economy to the most micro-level of the individual worker in a household. It is what we do and who we are. (E. PAUL DURRENBERGER & JUDITH MARTI, introduction, Labor in Cross-cultural Perspective)
• Labor, laughing at difficulties, spans majestic rivers, carries viaducts over marshy swamps, suspends bridges over deep ravines, pierces the solid mountains with the dark tunnel, blasting rocks and filling hollows, and, while linking together all nations of the earth pities the proud fool and laughs him to scorn. He shall pass to dust, forgotten; but Labor will live forever, glorious in its conquests and monuments, and will keep organized no matter how many temporary defeats it endures. (NEWMAN HALL, “The Dignity of Labor”, The Golden Treasury of Poetry and Prose)
• As salt savors the broth, so does labor give a relish to pleasure. (WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs)
• But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest. (LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina)
• It is to labor, and to labor only, that man owes everything possessed of exchangeable value. Labor is the talisman that has raised him from the condition of the savage: that has changed the desert and the forest into cultivated fields; that has covered the earth with cities, and the ocean with ships; that has given us plenty, comfort, and elegance, instead of want, misery, and barbarism. (JOHN RAMSAY MCCULLOCH, The Principles of Political Economy)
• Labor conquers all things. (VIRGIL, attributed, Day’s Collacon)
• Labor is both a transformation of nature, and a realization of human meanings in it. Labor is a happening or a doing in which the unity of man and nature is constituted in a certain way, on the basis of their mutual transformation: man objectifies himself in labor and the object is torn out of its original context, adapted and processed. Through labor, man is objectified and the object is humanized. In humanizing nature and in objectifying (realizing) meanings man forms a human world. Man lives in a world of his own artifacts and meanings. (KAREL KOSIK, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World)
• I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living. (JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, remarks at the 75th Anniversary Celebration of Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., “To Men of Vision and High Purpose”, May 3, 1941)
• As brightness is to rustiness, so labor excelleth idleness. (THALES, attributed, Day’s Collacon)
• It is … only through strife, through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and by resolute courage, we move on to better things. (THEODORE ROOSEVELT, response to the toast “The State of New York” at the Lincoln Club Dinner in New York City, Feb. 13, 1899)
• You desire to be learned, wealthy, and great, without labor; it is one of the follies still extant in the world. (G. P. MORRIS, attributed, Day’s Collacon)
• The truth beyond the fetish’s glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its price tag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made. (LEAH HAGER COHEN, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revolutions on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things)
• The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home. (THEODORE PARKER, Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Man)
• Labor rids us of three great evils–poverty, vice, and boredom. (VOLTAIRE, attributed, Day’s Collacon)
• Labor is King; though the gold wears the crown, Labor dethrones gold at will; Labor, when willing, makes money go down, Labor, though modest, rules still. (HENRY LARGE, “Labor is King”, The Poetical Works of Henry Large)
• There is a beautiful reciprocity between labor and wealth; if the latter is produced by the former, the former is invigorated and sustained by the latter. (TRISTAM BURGESS, attributed, The Modern Farmer: Or, Home in the Country)

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He who lives upon the fruit of his own labor, escapes the contempt of haughty benefactors.
SAADI, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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Sulky labor and the labor of sorrow are little worth. Whatever a man does with a guilty feeling he is apt to do wrong ; and whatever he does with a melancholy feeling he is likely to do by halves.
JAMES HAMILTON, Life in Earnest

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What is acquired without labor is seldom worth acquiring at all.
ANNE RADCLIFFE, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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Labor clears the forest, and drains the morass, and makes the wilderness rejoice and blossom as the rose. Labor drives the plow, and scatters the seed, and reaps the harvest, and grinds the corn, and converts it into bread, the staff of life. Labor, tending the pastures and sweeping the waters as well as cultivating the soil, provides with daily sustenance the nine hundred millions of the family of man.
NEWMAN HALL, “The Dignity of Labor”, The Golden Treasury of Poetry and Prose

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Before the reward there must be labor. You plant before you harvest. You sow in tears before you reap in joy.
RALPH RANSOM, “Steps on the Stairway”

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By persistent labor man may attain to all excellence.
DEMOSTHENES, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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Providence has decreed that those common acquisitions, money, gems, plate, noble mansions, and dominion, should be sometimes bestowed on the indolent and unworthy; but those things which constitute our true riches, and which are properly our own, must be procured by our own labor.
ERASMUS, attributed, Day’s Collacon

He that labors is tempted by one devil; he that is idle, by a thousand.
ITALIAN PROVERB

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All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., attributed, A Martin Luther King Treasury

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Without labor nothing prospers.
SOPHOCLES, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden

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Without work men are utterly undone.
NEVIL SHUTE, Ruined City

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Labor has a bitter root, but a sweet taste.
HALM, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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The general tendency towards an eight-hour working day has undoubtedly been healthful, and it is wise for the State to set a good example as an employer of labor, both as to the number of hours of labor exacted and as to paying a just and reasonable wage.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, memorandum filed with Assembly Bill number 2222 entitled “An Act to amend chapter four hundred and fifteen of the laws of eighteen hundred and ninety-seven, entitled ‘An Act in relation to labor’”

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I have two problems with hard labor: hard and labor.
JAROD KINTZ, $3.33

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God has laid upon us many severe trials in this world, but He has created labour for us, and all is compensated. Thanks to labour, the bitterest tears are dried; a serious consoler, it always promises less than it bestows; a pleasure unparalleled, it is still the salt of other pleasures. Everything abandons you — gaiety, wit, love — labour alone is always present.
E. LEGOUVE, The Guernsey Magazine, Aug. 1877

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I would have labor a blessing, as God designed it should be; and not have it made a curse by oppression.
C. E. LESTER, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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Sulky labor, and the labor of sorrow are little worth: if you could only shed tranquility over the conscience and infuse joy into the soul, you would do more to make the man a thorough worker than if you could lend him the force of Hercules, or the hundred arms of Briareus.
WILBERFORCE, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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Labor is the only wealth of the poor, and the largest hands, those of the poor, hold the least, and have the least to hold; the poor are valuable for their thews and sinews; they have limbs to toil and shoulders to bear burdens, but the oppressor remembers not that they have hearts to feel, or mouths to be fed, or that there is a blood stronger than steam. The black iron is meted out to them, whilst the yellow gold gladdens the better sort.
ACTON, Acton; or, The Circle of Life: A Collection of Thoughts and Observations Designed to Delineate Life, Man, and the World

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It is good to labor; it is also good to rest from labor.
HORACE, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.
LUDWIG VON MISES, Liberalism

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Labor is a category unique to capitalism. In capitalism, labor is the touchstone of social life: it is a material property of human actors, bearing physical, nearly tangible qualities. It is also the touchstone, the foundation, of subjectivity and morality. Labor does not occupy such a position outside capitalism.
MARTHA LAMPLAND, The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary

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It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
JOHN RUSKIN, On the Nature of Gothic Architecture

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He who labors diligently need never despair.
MENANDER, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.
LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina

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Of the laws of nature, on which the condition of man depends, that which is attended with the greatest number of consequences, is the necessity of labor for obtaining the means of subsistence, as well as the means of the greatest part of our pleasure.
JAMES MILL, The Article Government

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There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.
STEVEN GOULD, Jumper

The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits of others’ labor.
LUDWIG VON MISES, Liberalism

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We assert that labor which is now monotonous, repugnant, and degrading, can be ennobled, elevated, and made honorable; or in other words, that industry can be rendered attractive!
A. BRISBANE, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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To assert that labor is not the destiny of man, and that it cannot become for him a source of happiness, is to calumniate the Creator.
C. VIGOUREUX, attributed, Day’s Collacon

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Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor’s historic threat of violence against capital.
EDMUND MORRIS, Theodore Rex

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The motto marked upon our foreheads, written upon our door-posts, channeled in the earth, and wafted upon the waves, is and must be, “Labor is honorable, and idleness is dishonorable.”
T. CARLYLE, attributed, Life’s Common Way

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Labour, though it was at first inflicted as a curse, seems to be the gentlest of all punishments, and is fruitful of a thousand blessings.
JOHN ROGERS PITMAN, “Goodness of God”, A Second Course of Sermons for the Year

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Year after year, unto death; yea, what a weariness is it!
Labour, for the pale-faced scribe, drudging at his hated desk,
Who bartereth for needful pittance the untold gold of health;
Labour, with fear, for the merchant, whose hopes are ventured on the sea;
Labour, with care, for the man of law, responsible for his gains;
Labour, with envy and annoyance, where strangers will thee wealth;
Labour, with indolence and gloom, where wealth falleth from a father;
Labour, unto all, whether aching thews, or aching head, or spirit–
The curse on the sons of men, in all their states, is labour.
Nevertheless, to the diligent, labour bringeth blessing:
The thought of duty sweeteneth toil, and travail is as pleasure;
And time spent in doing, hath a comfort that is not for the idle.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy

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It has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, “Fragments of a Tariff Discussion”, December 1, 1847

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Labor with what zeal we will,
Something still remains undone,
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, “Something Left Undone”

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Labour is the purgatory of the erring.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON, Lucretia; or, The children of Night