Quotes About Labor

Let us, then, be up and doing,With a heart for any fate;Still achieving, still pursuing,Learn to labor and to wait.

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, "Virginia's slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born.

What is precious to us in an author's work is the labor of his soul and not the architectural structure in which he packs his thoughts and feelings.

To Konstantin Levin the country was good first because it afforded a field for labor, of the usefulness of which there could be no doubt. To Sergey Ivanovitch the country was particularly good, because there it was possible and fitting to do nothing.

But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended is dishonest.

These things are so, because men have ceased to live by their own labour, and have taken to depending on the labour of others. In the old time, men lived according to God's law. They had what was their own, and coveted not what others had produced

The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.

My field was God's earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.

I used to think if I could be free I should be the happiest woman," a young Mississippi woman recalled. "But when my master come to me, and says 'Lizzie, you is free!' it seems like I was in a kind of daze. And when I would wake up in the morning I would think to myself, Is I free? Hasn't I got to get up before daylight and go into the field and work?

No I wont whip you. Never no more. Sit down thar all of you and listen to what I got to tell you. I hates to do it but I must. You all aint my niggers no more. You is free. Just as free as I am. Here I have raised you all to work for me, and now you are going to leave me. I am an old man, and I cant get along without you. I dont know what I am going to do.

We work so hard and get nothing for our labor but jes our 'lowance, we 'bleege to steal," a South Carolina slave explained in 1863, "and den we must keep from dem ebery ting or dey suffer us too much. But dey take all our labor, and steal our chil'ren, and we only take dare chicken.

Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself.

We may set it down as a historical law: fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where the conservative labor parties prevented the proletariat from utilizing the revolutionary situation and seizing power.

Jesus Christ is the rest of God. He is, as N. T. Wright has put it, "the fulfillment of the sabbath."114 By taking Christ as our rest, we cease from our labors just as God did from His.115 Christianity, therefore, begins not with a do, but with a done—"It is finished!"116 We enter into God's rest, and we labor from there.

Everything was silent. Only man was awake in his misery, laboring in the sweat of his brow for the sake of this absurd existence that he passionately loves and despises in equal measure.

Objectionable, tedious, irritating labour, - this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything. Genius must submit to cultivate an ass within itself - the condition being so humiliating that man will seldom take up the job.

Getting an education by itself, of course, does not guarantee financial success. There must, after all, be an increase in demand for educated labor to match the increase in supply.

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what's at stake isn't a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.

An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that 'begging bowl' to which the gift is drawn.

we would no longer call it an ego at all. The gift leaves all boundary and circles into mystery. The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. Anything contained within a boundary must contain as well its own exhaustion. The

Significantly, it was during the third dynasty of Ur-a period of viogorous constructive activity-that all the kings except the founder claimed divinity. This evidence decisively couples divine kingship with the characteristic public works program of the megamachine. Little tasks might still be left to little men, but big tasks belonged to the king by reason of the special powers he commanded: above all, the unique power to create a colossal labor machine.

But instead of freeing labor, the royal mega-machine boasted of imprisoning and enslaving it.

By the time Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century B.C., the over-all division of labor and the minute subdivision into specialisms had reached a point comparable to that which it has come to again in our own time; for he records that "some physicians are for the eyes, others for the head, others for the teeth, others for the belly, and others for internal disorders.