William Butler Yeats Quotes

Who will not suffer labor in this world, let him not be born.

Another sad comestive truth is that the best foods are the products of infinite and wearying trouble. The trouble need not be taken by the consumer, but someone, ever since the Fall, has had to take it.

Man is born to labor.

The principle of work is part of self-discipline. Now, my dear young sisters, I have lived a good many years longer than you, but even back in Grandpa's time there was something to make you want to lie down and go to sleep-they called it work.

Labor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Laborwas toil, distress, trouble, fatigue--an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.

The greatest part of mankind ... are given up to labor, and enslaved to the necessity of their mean condition; whose lives are worn out only in the provisions for living.

Work ... is redemption.

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

Before man's fall the rose was born,St. Ambrose says, without the thorn;But for man's fault then was the thornWithout the fragrant rose-bud born; But ne'er the rose without the thorn.

No one knows how hard one works.

Being a human means waking up in this world, where we all have to work and slog to put food on the table.

There are only two ways of making money: the hard way and the very hard way!

I am always for the man who wishes to work.

Nothing can substitute for just plain hard work

And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.

Luck whines; labor whistles.

Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers.

You got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues...And you know it don't come easy.

Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable.

Everybody works . . . . That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.

Virtue's guard is labor; ease, her sleep.

Who remove stones, bruise their fingers.

Genius, without work, is certainly a dumb oracle, and it is unquestionably true that the men of the highest genius have invariably been found to be amongst the most plodding, hard-working, and intent men -- their chief characteristic apparently consisting simply in their power of laboring more intensely and effectively than others.