Quotes About Labor

Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money.

After about five hours of pushing, my midwife and my birthing assistant said, 'You know, we have a few suggestions.' And I was like, 'Really? After five hours of pushing you have a few suggestions? You couldn't have told me five minutes in?'

The best way to afford a suit is to work.

To sum it all up, the objective of my life has been to give work a moral and economic dignity.

My first job entailed spending a summer working in a cornfield in Nebraska.

I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers.

I worked three summers putting in sewer pipe and guardrail on the road in Ohio.

My paternal grandfather worked in the mill all his life. My father worked in the mill almost his whole life. I worked in the mill while I was going to college in the summers. And then, for one stretch, I quit school and worked one year.

Mexicans work so hard. Jamaicans are like, 'Hey mon. Take it easy. You work too 'ard.' Sneak into the country Sunday night, working Monday morning.

though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.

When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. This native determination guides his labor and his spending. He wants an equipment of means and tools proper to his talent. And to save on this point were to neutralize the special strength and helpfulness of each mind. Do your work, respecting the excellence of the work, and not its acceptableness.

The Negroes are our benefactors. They produce coffee, tobacco, cotton, sugar, rum, wine, and brandy—all the luxuries of the civilized world. Yet how are they treated in return? Among

The practical common-sense of modern society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion, take, is the natural genius of the British mind.

you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. [ 1967 interview ]

If you had your way you'd pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you'd leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and you'd have a devil of a time thinking up things to do so you wouldn't go crazy. Instead of that, why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life, son.

Y por primera vez comprendí que detrás de cada libro hay un hombre. Un hombre que tuvo que pensarlo. Un hombre que empleó mucho tiempo en llevarlo al papel.

They give you wages as they'd fling a bone to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful. It's worse than slavery. You don't expect a slave that's bought for money to be grateful. And if you sell your work - what is it but selling your own self? You've got so many days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me enough for my life? Ah! But they throw at you your week's money and expect you to say, thank you before you pick it up.

He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour. It was too much trouble. He required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectivness of every human effort.