C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Labor
Labor conquers all things.
Blessed are the horny hands of toil!
All true work is sacred.
Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.
Labor, all labor, is noble and holy.
From labor health, from health contentment springs.
Observe, without labor nothing prospers.
Work is God’s ordinance as truly as prayer.
Virtue’s guard is labor; ease, her sleep.
No labor is hopeless.
Labor is the law of happiness.
Labor humanizes, exalts.
The labor we delight in physics pain.
From labor there shall come forth rest.
Labor, is the handmaid of religion.
For men must work and women must weep.
Honest labour bears a lovely face.
Genius may conceive, but patient labor must consummate.
If the power to do hard work is not talent, it is the best possible substitute for it.
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified.
Taxation reaches down to the base; but the base is labor, and labor pays all.
Bodily labor alleviates the pains of the mind; and hence arises the happiness of the poor.
The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of all pleasures.
Labour rids us of three great evils: irksomeness, vice and poverty.
Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.
Labor, therefore, is a duty from which no man living is exempt, without forfeiting his right to his daily bread.
Love labor; for if thou dost not want it for food, thou mayst for physic.
Nothing is denied to well-directed labor; nothing is ever to be attained without it.
Labor is the true alchemist that beats out in patient transmutation the baser metals into gold.
God has set labor and rest, as day and night to men successive.
Labor is the divine law of our existence; repose is desertion and suicide.
What is there that is illustrious that is not also attended by labor?
What men want is not talent, it is purpose; not the power to achieve, but the will to labor.
The duty of labor is written on a man’s body: in the stout muscle of the arm, and the delicate machinery of the hand.
Hard workers are usually honest. Industry lifts them above temptation.
There is always work, and tools to work withal, for those who will.
Labor is discovered to be the great, the grand conqueror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles.
The true epic of our times is not “Arms and the Man,” but “Tools and the Man,”—an infinitely wider kind of epic.
Labor is one of the great elements of society,—the great substantial interest on which we all stand.
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.
Moderate labor of the body conduces to the preservation of health, and cures many initial diseases.
If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.
The lottery of honest labor, drawn by Time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.
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.
Labor in this country is independent and proud. It has not to ask the patronage of capital, but capital solicits the aid of labor.
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!
There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work. Were he ever so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works.
Some relaxation is necessary to people of every degree; the head that thinks and the hand that labors, must have some little time to recruit their diminished powers.
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.
There is nothing truly valuable which can be purchased without pains and labor. The gods have set a price upon every real and noble pleasure.
God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into the nest. He does not unearth the good that the earth contains, but He puts it in our way, and gives us the means of getting it ourselves.
To labor rightly and earnestly is to walk in the golden track that leads to God. It is to adopt the regimen of manhood and womanhood. It is to come into sympathy with the great struggle of humanity toward perfection. It is to adopt the fellowship of all the great and good the world has ever known.
What a glorious spectacle is that of the labor of man upon the earth! It includes everything in it that is glorious. Look around and tell me what you see, that is worth seeing, that is not the work of your hands and the hands of your fellows,—the multitudes of all ages.
It is not work that kills men, it is worry. Work is healthy, you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Fear secretes acids, but love and trust are sweet juices.
There is no doubt of nobility of that man who pours into life the honest vigor of his toil, over those who compose the feathery foam of fashion that sweeps along Broadway; who consider the insignia or honor to consist in wealth and indolence; and who, ignoring the family history, paint coats of arms to cover up the leather aprons of their grandfathers.
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.