This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to well-directed labor: nothing is to be obtained without it." - Joshua Reynolds, fully Sir Joshua Reynolds
"Like every good teacher, authority should labor to render itself useless." - Louis Auguste Sabatier
"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." - Sydney Smith
"Every group stigmatizes anyone who fails in zeal, labor, and sacrifices for group interests." - William Graham Sumner
"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." - Thomas A. Bennett
"A Humanist Code of Ethics: Do no harm to the earth, she is your mother. Being is more important than having. Never promote yourself at another's expense. Hold life sacred; treat it with reverence. Allow each person the dignity of his or her labor." - Arthur Dobrin
"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." - Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
"Thought is the labor of intellect, reverie is its pleasure." - Victor Hugo
"Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"There is but one rule of conduct for a man - to do the right thing. The cost may be dear in money, in friends, in influence, in labor, in a prolonged and painful sacrifice, but the cost not to do right is far more dear: You pay in the integrity of your manhood, in your honor, in strength of character; and, for a timely gain, you barter the infinite." - Archer G. Jones
"I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living." - John D. Rockefeller, fully John Davidson Rockefeller I
"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." - 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." - Adam Smith
"The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable." - Adam Smith
"Labor humanizes, exalts." - Amos Bronson Alcott
"The end of labor is to gain leisure." - Aristotle NULL
"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." - Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, known as Dean Stanley
"Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to Hell." - Ben Jonson
"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." - Blaise Pascal
"Labor builds up strength, but long idleness destroys it... Labor often dries the tear and brings happiness." - Cato the Elder, Marcus Porius Cato, aka Censorius (the Censor), Sapiens (the Wise), Priscus (the Ancient) NULL
"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." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Bodily labor alleviates the pain of the mind." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"God sells knowledge for labor, honor for risk." - Dutch Proverbs
"Leisure, though the propertied classes give its name to their own idleness, is not idleness. It is not even a luxury: it is a necessity, and a necessity of the first importance. Some of the most valuable work done in the world has been done at leisure, and never paid for in cash or kind. Leisure any be described as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes: labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation." - George Bernard Shaw
"There is no divine right of property. Nothing is so completely a man’s own that he may do what he likes with it... Nevertheless, as it is obviously well that each man should labor without fear of being deprived of the use and enjoyment of the product of their labor - as in the nature of things he would not labor at all without some such incentive, it may be said that a man has natural right to own the product of his labor... By this natural right of the individual is still subject to all the limitations imposed by the rights of his fellows." - George Bernard Shaw
"Labor to keep alive that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience." - George Washington
"The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and there are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal labors, and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be "happy" or thought that mortal man could be happy." - Hannah Arendt
"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions for a poetic or divine life." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Tell me not in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow is our destined end or way; but to act, that each to-morrow find us farther than today... Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act - act in the living Present! Hear within, and God o’erhead. Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints in the sands of time... Let us then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Let parents who hate their offspring rear them to hate labor, and to inherit riches; an before long they will be stung by every vice, racked by its poison, and damned by its penalty." - Henry Ward Beecher
"We should so live and labor in our time that what came to us as seed may; go to the next generation as blossom, and what came to us as blossom may go to them as fruit. This is what is meant by progress." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Labor conquers all things." - Homer NULL
"Genius may conceive, but patient labor must consummate." - Horace Mann
"Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments." - Horace Mann
"There is but one pursuit in life which it is in the power of all to follow, and of all to attain. It is subject to no disappointments, since he that perseveres makes every difficulty an advancement, and every conquest a victory; and this is the pursuit of virtue. Sincerely to aspire after virtue is to gain her; and zealously to labor after her ways is to receive them." - James Bryant Conant
"Sincerely to aspire after virtue is to gain her, and zealously to labor after her wages is to receive them." - James Bryant Conant
"A just security to property is not afforded by that government under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species; where arbitrary tax invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied by an unfeeling policy as another spur; in violation of that sacred property which heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities." - James Madison
"The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity." - John Ruskin
"There is a large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done." - John Ruskin
"Without seeking, truth cannot be known to all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by himself out of its husk, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own." - John Ruskin
"The cause of profit is that labor produces more than is required for its support." - John Stuart Mill
"Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them." - Joseph Joubert
"By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged class in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed." - Lewis Mumford
"Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television." - Lewis Thomas
"If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL