Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

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…

Labor | Happiness |

Thomas Jefferson

Those who labor on the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.

Earth | Focus | God | Labor | People | Sacred | Virtue | Virtue |

Thomas Jefferson

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

Good | Government | Improvement | Industry | Labor | Men | Wise |

Joseph Priestley

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.

Discovery | God | Labor | Love | Mankind | Sense | Truth | Discovery | Happiness |

Louis Auguste Sabatier

Like every good teacher, authority should labor to render itself useless.

Authority | Good | Labor |

Sydney Smith

Among the smaller duties of life, I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due. Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it produces more labor and more talent than twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius, and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy.

Duty | Important | Justice | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Men | Praise | Reputation | Wealth | Talent |

Thomas A. Bennett

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.

Confidence | Labor | Self |

Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it.

Ability | Effort | Focus | Labor | People | Success | Thinking | Will |

Victor Hugo

Thought is the labor of intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

Labor | Pleasure | Thought |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Hazard | Labor | Power |

Adam Smith

The whole annual produce of the land and labor of every country, or what comes to the same thing, the whole price of that annual produce, naturally divides itself... into three parts; the rent of the land, the wages of labor, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are the three great, original, and constituent orders of every civilized society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived.

Labor | Land | Order | People | Price | Society |

Adam Smith

Servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. IT is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.

Body | Circumstances | Equity | Happy | Labor | People | Society | Society |

Aristotle NULL

The end of labor is to gain leisure.

Labor | Leisure |

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, known as Dean Stanley

To labor and not see the end of our labors, to sow and not to reap, to be removed from this earthly scene before our work has been appreciated… is a law so common in the highest characters of history, that none can be said to be altogether exempt from its operation.

History | Labor | Law | Work |

Ben Jonson

Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to Hell.

Heaven | Hell | Labor |

Blaise Pascal

We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart, and it is from this last that we know first principles; and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to combat them. The skeptics who desire truth alone labor in vain.

Desire | Heart | Labor | Nothing | Principles | Reason | Truth |

Cato the Elder, Marcus Porius Cato, aka Censorius (the Censor), Sapiens (the Wise), Priscus (the Ancient) NULL

Labor builds up strength, but long idleness destroys it... Labor often dries the tear and brings happiness.

Idleness | Labor | Strength |

Charles Caleb Colton

He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place; otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing.

Cost | Difficulty | Energy | Enough | Labor | Little | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Vice |