This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor." - Ulysses S. Grant, fully Ulysses Simpson Grant, born Hiram Ulysses Grant
"The painter draws with his eyes, not with his hands. Whatever he sees, if he sees it clear, he can put down. The putting of it down requires, perhaps, much more care and labor, but no more muscular agility than it takes for him to write his name. Seeing clearly is the important thing" - Maurice Grosser
"The dignity of labor depends not on what you do, but how you do it." - Edwin Osgood Grover
"I know no such thing as genius; it is nothing but labor and diligence." - William Hogarth
"The sweetest type of heaven is home - nay, heaven is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life. It stands at the end of every day’s labor, and beckons us to its bosom; and life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides us from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansion prepared for us." -
"Never was there a time, in the history of the world, when moral heroes were more needed. The world waits for such, the providence of God has commanded science to labor and prepare the way for such. For them she is laying her iron tracks, and stretching her wires and bridging the oceans. But where are they? Who shall breathe into our civil and political relations the breath of a higher life? Who shall touch the eyes of a paganized science, and of a pantheistic philosophy, that they may see God? Who shall consecrate to the glory of God the triumphs of science? Who shall bear the life-boat to the stranded and perishing nations." -
"Labor is life; thought is light." - Victor Hugo
"If at any time all labor should cease, and all existing provision be equally divided among the people, at the end of a single year there could scarcely be one human being left alive - all would have perished by want of subsistence... Universal idleness would speedily result in universal ruin; and ... useless labor is, in this respect, the same as idleness." - Abraham Lincoln
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." - Abraham Lincoln
"It is labor... which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything." - John Locke
"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 give us plenty, comfort, and elegance, instead of want, misery, and barbarism." - William M’Culloch
"Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation." - Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels
"Labor! all labor is noble and holy! Let thy great deeds by thy prayer to thy God." - Frances S. Osgood
"Excellence is never granted to man, but as the reward of labor. It argues, indeed, no small strength of mind to persevere in the habits of industry, without the pleasure of perceiving those advantages which, like the hands of a clock, whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation." - Joshua Reynolds, fully Sir Joshua Reynolds
"There is no expedient to which man will not resort to void the real labor of thinking." - Joshua Reynolds, fully Sir Joshua Reynolds
"Begin the education of the heart, not with the cultivation of noble propensities, but with the cutting away of those that are evil. When once the noxious herbs are withered and rooted out, then the more noble plants, strong in themselves, will shoot upwards. The virtuous heart, like the body, become strong and healthy more by labor than nourishment." -
"The great inequality in manner of living, the extreme idleness of some, and the excessive labor of others, the easiness of exciting and gratifying our sensual appetites, the too exquisite foods of the wealthy which overheat and fill them with indigestion, and, on the other hand, the unwholesome food of the poor, often, bad as it is, insufficient for their needs, which induces them, when opportunity offers, to eat voraciously and overcharge their stomachs; all these, together with sitting up late, and excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, mental exhaustion, the innumerable pains and anxieties inseparable from every condition of life, by which the mind of man is incessantly tormented; these are too fatal proofs that the greater part of our ills are our own making, and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"A scholar who depends on his own labor... may be called happy." - Sefer Eliyahu Rabbah
"Those who obtain riches by labor, care, and watching, know their value. Those who impart them to sustain and extend knowledge, virtue, and religion, know their use. Those who lose them by accident or fraud know their vanity. And those who experience the difficulties and dangers of preserving them know their perplexities." - Charles Simmons
"If a man loves the labor of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
"As the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man." -
"The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets." - Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
"Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and cheerfulness. Thus happy have we seen the country." - Daniel Webster
"If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves." - Daniel Webster
"Man, being essentially active, must find in activity his joy, as well as his beauty and glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"Faith is not reason’s labor, but repose." - Edward Young
"The reward of work is to come, whereas the endurance of the labor is immediate." - Al-Jāḥiẓ, full name Abū ʿUthman ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Kinānī al-Baṣrī NULL
"Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading. " - Benedict of Nursia, aka Saint Benedict of Nursia NULL
"There is no expedient to which a man will go to avoid the real labor of thinking." - Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
"Is not hope of being one day able to purchase and enjoy luxuries a great spur to labor and industry? May not luxury, therefore, produce more than it consumes, if without such a spur people would be, as they are naturally enough inclined to be, lazy and indolent?" - Benjamin Franklin
"Sloth (like Rust) consumes faster than Labor wears: the used Key is always bright." - Benjamin Franklin
"Happiness cannot be overtaken by those who pursue her. Happiness is a by-product of cheerful, honest labor dedicated to a worthwhile task… We cannot have happiness unless we give of ourselves… If it is true that we cannot get happiness unless we give it, it is also true that we cannot give it without getting it. Happiness has correctly been compared to a perfume. You cannot pour it on others without getting a few drops on yourself." - Sidney Greenberg
"Happiness is a by-product of cheerful, honest labor dedicated to a worthwhile task… We cannot have happiness unless we give of ourselves…" - Sidney Greenberg
"He who has enough to satisfy what he wants, and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance - all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality and pride." - Henry of Langenstein NULL
"To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government." - Abraham Lincoln
"All those who labor in the discovery and communication of truth, if they are actuated by a love of it and a sense of its importance to the happiness of mankind may consider themselves as workers together with God." - Joseph Priestley