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LABOR quotes
The pernicious, debilitating tendencies of bodily pleasure need to be counteracted by the invigorating exercises of bodily labor; whereas, bodily labor without bodily pleasure converts the body into a mere machine, and brutifies the soul.
Alexander the Great, reflecting on his friends degenerating into sloth and luxury, told them that it was a most slavish thing to luxuriate, and a most royal thing to labor.
From labor, health; from health, contentment springs.
If we would have anything of benefit, we must earn it, and earning it become shrewd, inventive, ingenious, active, enterprising.
Next to faith in God, is faith in labor.
Hard workers are usually honest; industry lifts them above temptation.
The necessity of labor is a part of the primeval curse; and all the beauty, or glory, or dignity pertaining to it, depends on the ends to which it is the means.
What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but will to labor. I believe that labor judiciously and continuously applied becomes genius.
Blessed is the man that has found his work.—One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
The true epic of our times is not "arms and the man," but "tools and the man," an infinitely wider kind of epic.
There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work.—Were he ever so benighted and forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man who actually and earnestly works.
Labor is life; from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God!
I find successful exertion is a powerful means of exhilaration, which discharges itself in good humor upon others.
A man's best friends are his ten fingers.
Labor was the primal curse, but it was softened into mercy, and made the pledge of cheerful days, and nights without a groan.
No way has been found for making heroism easy, even for the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for him. The world was created as an audience for him; the atoms of which it is made are opportunities.
Whatever there is of greatness in the United States, or indeed in any other country, is due to labor. The laborer is the author of all greatness and wealth. Without labor there would be no government, and no leading class, and nothing to preserve.
Men give me some credit for genius. All the genius I have lies just in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I make the people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.
Work is a great blessing; after evil came into the world, it was given as an antidote, not as a punishment.
Labor—the expenditure of vital effort in some form, is the measure, nay, it is the maker of values.
None so little enjoy themselves, and are such burdens to themselves, as those who have nothing to do.—Only the active have the true relish of life.
Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
Do what thou dost as if the earth were heaven, and thy last day the day of judgment.
Toil and pleasure, in their nature opposites, are yet linked together in a kind of necessary connection.
Men seldom die of hard work; activity is God's medicine. The highest genius is willingness and ability to do hard work. Any other conception of genius makes it a doubtful, if not a dangerous possession.
It is to labor and to labor only, that man owes everything 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.
Labor is the divine law of our existence; repose is desertion and suicide.
Nothing is impossible to the man who can will, and then do; this is the only law of success.
Nature is just toward men. It recompenses them for their sufferings; it renders them laborious, because to the greatest toils it attaches the greatest rewards.
Labor is rest from the sorrows that greet us; from all the petty vexations that meet us; from the sin-promptings that assail us; from the world-sirens that lure us to ill.
You and I toiling for earth, may at the same time be toiling for heaven, and every day's work may be a Jacob's ladder reaching up nearer to God.
The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.
Love, therefore, labor; if thou shouldst not want it for food, thou mayest for physic. It is wholesome to the body and good for the mind; it prevents the fruit of idleness.
Nothing is denied to well-directed labor, and nothing is ever to be attained without it.
The labor of the body relieves us from the fatigues of the mind; and this it is which forms the happiness of the poor.
God intends no man to live in this world without working; but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work.
It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other. Yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up to no science entirely, for science is but one.
As steady application to work is the healthiest training for every individual, so is it the best discipline of a state. Honorable industry alway travels the same road with enjoyment and duty, and progress is altogether impossible without it.
There is but one method of success, and that is hard labor; and a man who will not pay that price for distinction had better at once dedicate himself to the pursuit of the fox.
There are many ways of being frivolous, only one way of being intellectually great; that is honest labor.
Without labor nothing prospers.
No abilities, however splendid, can command success without intense labor and persevering application.
The guard of virtue is labor, and ease her sleep.
The labor and sweat of our brows is so far from being a curse, that without it our very bread would not be so great a blessing.—If it were not for labor, men could neither eat so much, nor relish so pleasantly, nor sleep so soundly, nor be so healthful, so useful, so strong, so patient, so noble, nor so untempted.
Avoid idleness, and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and useful employment; for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses where the soul is unemployed and the body is at ease; for no easy, healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but of all employments, bodily labor is the most useful, and of the greatest benefit for driving away the Devil.
I have no secret of success but hard work.
The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of all pleasures.
Labor rids us of three great evils— irksomeness, vice, and poverty.
No race can prosper 'til it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling the field, as in writing a poem.
Labor is one of the great elements of society—the great substantial interest on which we all stand. Not feudal service, or predial toil, or the irksome drudgery by one race of mankind subjected, on account of their color, to another; but labor, intelligent, manly, independent, thinking and acting for itself, earning its own wages, accumulating those wages into capital, educating childhood, maintaining worship, claiming the right of the elective franchise, and helping to uphold the great fabric of the State—that is American labor; and all my sympathies are with it, and my voice, till I am dumb, will be for it.
Labor is the great producer of wealth; it moves all other causes.
If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.
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