Archive

Quotes

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

—Billie Holiday, 1956

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1758

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.

—John Ruskin, 1850

Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

—Herman Melville, 1849

Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.

—Slogan of the National Labor Union of the United States, 1866

Labor is no disgrace.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC
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