Meaningful Labor Quotes

Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. . . . The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. . . . When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.

Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work, and all work is empty save when there is love; and when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.

Even if work were not an economic necessity, it is a spiritual necessity.

Every labourer is a father, his labour is his child. Choose your project carefully and achieve it worthily

All true work is sacred.

All work is empty save when there is love.

Every child should be taught that useful work is worship and that intelligent labor is the highest form of prayer.

If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then the bridge ought not to be built.

There is honor in all work, in all tasks, but take it one step further. Make what you do a labor of love. Then your work will truly touch and change the world in the way you desire. The work you do, whatever your chosen field, will be work that heals.

There is nothing glamorous in what I do. I'm a working man. Perhaps I’m luckier than most in that I receive considerable satisfaction from doing useful work which I, and sometimes others, think is good.

No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.

He who busies himself in mean occupations, produces in the very pains he takes about things of little or no use, an evidence against himself of his negligence and indisposition to what is really good

The spirit in which one earns his daily bread means as much to his soul as the bread itself may mean to his body.

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.

How we shall earn our bread is a grave question; yet it is a sweet and inviting question. Let us not shirk it, as is usually done.It is the most important and practical question which is put to man. Let us not answer it hastily. Let us not be content to get our bread in some gross, careless, and hasty manner. Some men go a-hunting, some a-fishing, some a-gaming, some to war; but none have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn their bread.

If thousands are thrown out of employment, it suggests that they were not well employed. Why don't they take the hint? It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

The only other job that I've ever had that provided that time in the morning, where you're going to work and you can't wait to get there, and the sun's rising, and you are moving towards something you look forward to, was getting up and doing every day, was being a carpenter.

Man matures through work which inspires him to difficult good.

No healthy civilization can ever be reared on a foundation of devitalized work.

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")