It is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to regard them merely as so much muscle or physical power.
—Pope Leo XIII, 1891Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1903Toil 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, 1849Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.
—Clarence Darrow, 1932In 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, 1850If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1954The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.
—Eugene V. Debs, 1905Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.
—Gustave Flaubert, 1845A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
—Victor Hugo, 1862He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCLabor is no disgrace.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCA tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W.H. Auden, 1946To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.
—Nell Scovell, 1991Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1758Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
—Anatole France, 1881One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.
—William Faulkner, 1958Man is a tool-using animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
—Thomas Carlyle, 1836Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.
—Charles Lamb, 1805God sells us all things at the price of labor.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCLabor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.
—Ulysses S. Grant, 1877The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.
—Théophile Gautier, c. 1835Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
—Henry George, 1879“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964You 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, 1956A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
—Dorothy L. Sayers, 1947It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
—Upton Sinclair, 1935Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.
—Slogan of the National Labor Union of the United States, 1866I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1855The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
—George Eliot, 1876I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.
—Roald Dahl, 1984