Know That Your Labor Quotes & Sayings

I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader? — Adam Johnson

I'm not opposed to letting people work and labor in our country, but we shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship. We're the only country I know of where a person can come in illegally and that baby becomes a citizen and I think that should stop also. — Rand Paul

That's what building a body of work is all about. It's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star, because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative. It deepens and expands with each day you give your best. You may have setbacks and you may have failures, but you're not done. — Barack Obama

Technology, while providing us many advantages, encourages us to race through our days so that we no longer know what we'd do if we were to slow down. Labor-saving devices seem not only to have failed to enhance the quality of our lives and free up more time, but get between us and the immediate, sensory pleasures of life and increase the pressures on us to do more. Many of us feel cut off from life's blessings, from our neighbors, from the wonders of nature, and from our sense of our own significance in the scheme of things. Modern life leaves us spiritually starved — Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

The ant, who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest, will furiously defend the fruit of his labor, against whatever robber assails him. So plain, that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged. — Abraham Lincoln

Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight living is a worthless act. To labor at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me. I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you — Jack London

We all know about Father Damien, the French priest who voluntarily forsook the world and went to the leper island of Molokai to labor among its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming misery, for death to come and release them from their troubles; — Mark Twain

All but a prophetic few must go about God's work in very quiet, very unspectacular ways. And as you labor to know Him, and to know that He knows you; as you invest your time
and your convenience
in quiet, unassuming service, you will indeed find that "He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up" (Matthew 4:6). — Jeffrey R. Holland

I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population. — Paul Robeson

I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have. — John Green

The Christian life is very much like climbing a hill of ice. You cannot slide up. You have to cut every step with an ice axe. Only with incessant labor in cutting and chipping can you make any progress. If you want to know how to backslide, leave off going forward. Cease going upward and you will go downward of necessity. You can never stand still. — Charles Spurgeon

[Writing is like fishing]. You don't bow because you made the fish. That's the difference. If you know that, then you bow for your labor.You crafted, you worked, you put in those hours so that you could catch that fish. But you didn't make that fish. You just caught the fish. That will help you stay humble and bow for the right reason and be very lucid about the work you do. — Sandra Cisneros

Dude, you know I'm not getting paid for this shit, which is probably against the law. Child labor going on right here in the heartland of America!
-Dan Garrett — Leah Rae Miller

Here below is not the land of happiness: I know it now; it is only the land of toil, and every joy which comes to us is only to strengthen us for some greater labor that is to succeed. — Johann Gottlieb Fichte

The view ... from my apartment ... was the World Trade Center ... and now it's gone, they attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity, and strength, and labor, and imagination and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what? You know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the South of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can't beat that! — Jon Stewart

Lord, teach me to be generous;
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
To give and not to count the cost;
To fight and not to heed the wounds;
To toil, and not to seek for rest;
To labor, and not to ask for reward -
except to know that I am doing your will. — Ignatius Of Loyola

Life's a forge! Yes, and hammer and anvil, too! You'll be roasted, smelted, and pounded, and you'll scarce know what's happening to you. But stand boldly to it! Metal's worthless till it's shaped and tempered! More labor than luck. Face the pounding, don't fear the proving; and you'll stand well against any hammer and anvil. — Lloyd Alexander

You hunt and catch your own food. Am I correct?"
"We are fierce predators of the night," DeChevue said proudly.
Edwin tried again, "You hunt and gather your own food?"
DeChevue still didn't get it. "Yes, M'sieur. We hunt, proudly."
"You know, there is a special name for people who have to catch and kill everything they eat."
"And that name has been the terror of the night from the dawn of man. Which name would you like? I can supply many. Nosferatu? Das Vampire?"
"Peasant," Edwin said. "A person who has to provide all his own food is a peasant. How is it that you have lived all this time and are still ignorant of the division of labor?"
DeChevue's mouth opened and closed several times. Each time he seemed on the verge of saying something, yet each time words failed him. — Patrick E. McLean

You know, I'm a total perfectionist, and I labor over trying to get things right. Whether we're putting together an opening for the Masters broadcast or when I was writing with my friend Eli Stillman a book about my dad called 'Always By My Side,' I'm always trying to find a way to do something better. — Jim Nantz

When you see a fashion show, you see those seven minutes of what was six months of tedious work of, you know, going up an inch and down an inch, changing it from one shade of red to another shade of red. So it's the same as any creative process. The result is what we see, but the process is really labor intensive and work. — Marc Jacobs

Christ and His angels and His prophets forever labor to buoy up our spirits, steady our nerves, calm our hearts, send us forth with renewed strength and resolute hope. They wish all to know that "if God be for us, who can be against us?"7 In the world we shall have tribulation, but we are to be of good cheer. Christ has overcome the world.8 Through His suffering and His obedience He has earned and rightly bears the crown of "Prince of Peace.", Nov. 1996 — Jeffrey R. Holland

If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamicsthat present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become. — Shoshana Zuboff

At least in a race you have mile markers and know how long you have to go. Labor is like running as hard as you can without knowing where the finish line is. — Lorraine Moller

On the plantations the slave owners would take their slaves' drums away because they didn't want them communicating with other slaves. They were afraid that the drum was some kind of magic signal system, a primal, coded language, which it was. And is. When the drums were taken away, other instruments were taken up - fifes and fiddles and the rest, and they were used for celebration and lamentation both, and a new kind of song sprung up, a work song, to document the labor in the fields, to pass the time, to pass on the content of the time, so that people would know what had happened. — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

We 've wholly forgotten how to die. But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when to end. — Henry David Thoreau

You know, you own a bar and you don't keep alcohol at home," she said, breathless. "I could have had a shot
it sometimes slows labor."
"We'll have some on hand for the next one."
"You keep talking like that's gonna happen," she said. "How ridiculous."
"I think my record speaks for itself. But Mel. I just want to make them, not deliver them."
"I hear ya, buddy" ...
-Jack and Mel — Robyn Carr

How many different ways there are of knowing a person - and even so there are all these different ways of knowing Christ; so that you may keep on all your lifetime, still wishing to get into another room, and another room, nearer and nearer to the great secret, still panting to "know him." Good Rutherford says, "I urge upon you a nearer communion with Christ, and a growing communion. There are curtains to be drawn by, in Christ, that we never shut, and new foldings in love with him. I despair that ever I shall shall win to the far end of that love; there are so many plies in it. Therefore, dig deep, and set by as much time in the day for him as you can, he will be won by labor. — Spurgeon, Charles H.

All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman's body. Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much longer period than other mammals, and because of the division of labor long established in human groups, where women not only bear and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children, most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman. — Adrienne Rich

I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know? — Elizabeth Alexander

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I'd known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we're always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we're doing things we technically don't know how to do. — Ben Fountain

Publishing a book is like planting a vegetable seed. The first day your book is out there is the same as seeing the first sprout from the ground. Is it ready for harvest? Obviously not. The fruit of your labor is still to come so long as you continue to nurture the soil by being persistent in letting readers know your book exists. If you give up on this process too early, your seed will dry up and be consumed by a most merciless sun. — Kevin Ortegel

Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?"
"Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside. — Christopher Moore

There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He's a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it's fair? I think it's fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he's got inspiration. It's right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There's stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know. — Stephen King

My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does , for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some free labor. — Henry David Thoreau

There ought to be a law that a guy has to leave a rose on your pillow to let you know he enjoyed the labor you put into his walk of shame. — Z.A. Maxfield

When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely. — Anne Michaels

I would say to bishops, and to all men in authority, we should have an interest in carrying on this work. We should labor to get the Spirit of God. It is our right, our privilege, and our duty to call upon the Lord, that the vision of our mind may be opened, so that we may see and understand the day and age in which we are living. It is your privilege, and mine too, to know the mind and will of the Lord concerning our duties, and if we fail to seek after this, we neglect to magnify our calling. — Wilford Woodruff

You know, it's people's lives, so as you get a little older, your own life narrative, I guess, invades a little more. It's not like we're traveling in separate buses to each show. It's a labor of love, so we just do it because we like it. Maybe someone's gonna move, or not want to go on a tour for some reason - that could happen, I guess. — Stephen Malkmus

Why don't you try to do without him, why don't you try to live alone? Do you really need his hands for your passion? Do you really need his heart for your throne? Do you need his labor for your baby? Do you need his beast for the bone? Do you need to hold a leash to be a lady? I know that you can make it, you can make it on your own. — Leonard Cohen

I brought soup just in case you changed your mind. Are the pains easing up at all?" He manfully kept the hopeful note out of his tone.
"All the activity must have set them off. They seem to be getting farther apart, and they're shorter in duration. From all the research I've done, that means false labor."
He felt like a man given a reprieve right before a death sentence, but he kept his features expressionless. He wanted her to count on him, and she couldn't do that if she knew he was petrified of delivering a baby.
"Will you try to eat something?" He walked farther into the room and set the tray on the end table. "It might help."
She flashed him a
smile that told him he didn't know what he was talking about, but she picked up the bowl of soup and spoon, sank down in the middle of the bed, tailor fashion, her back against the headboard, and regarded him steadily. — Christine Feehan

If it is not strong upon your heart to practice what you read, to what end do you read? To increase your own condemnation? If your light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing a man you are, the more miserable a man you will be in the day of recompense; your light and knowledge will more torment you than all the devils in hell. Your knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash you, and that scorpion that will forever bite you, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw you; therefore read, and labor to know that you may do
or else you are undone forever. — Thomas Brooks

We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth - if such a thing can even be said to exist. — Isaac Asimov

This is the greatest wealth we possess: to know how to direct our labors rightly. — Brigham Young

I do know that kind fate allowed me to find a couple of nice ideas after many years of feverish labor. — Albert Einstein

I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you. -Augustus Waters — John Green

Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park; an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children. — John Green

It was only when children's actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold. — Laura Kipnis

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw? — P. J. O'Rourke

When in place of love you have grieves. And in place of glory nonfulfillment of hopes you earn, know that it's a natural catastrophe preparing you for distinguished conditions. - Darmie Orem — Darmie Orem

You know not what you are capable of doing; you cannot sound the ocean of thought within you. You must labor, keep at it, and dig deep and long before you will begin to realize much. Be inactive - mourn because you were not created a giant in intellect, and you will die a fool. — L.G. Abell

The Bethlehem profit-sharing system is based on my belief that every man should get exactly what he makes himself worth. This is the only plan I know of which is equally fair to the employers and every class of employee. Someday, I hope, all labor troubles will be solved by such a system. — Charles M. Schwab

The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. — Lewis Hyde

You knew about the labor camps, though. About the massacres."
"It is easy to be lied to when you don't know any of those people firsthand. It's easy to believe when your king tells you that the people in Endovier deserve to be there because they're criminals or rebels who tried to slaughter innocent Adarlanian families."
"And how many of your countrymen would stand against your king if they, too, learned the truth? If they stopped to consider what it would be like if it were their family, their village, being enslaved or murdered? — Sarah J. Maas

For many years, it was believed that the pyramids were created on the sweat, blood and tears of slaves (with Hollywood often portraying this notion in films) but instead, we now know that they were built by a specialized team of around 5000 permanent employees and aided by up to 20,000 men on a temporary basis. These temporary employees would provide labor and other skills for around four months before being sent home. The — Roman Collins

We know that freedom has many dimensions. It is the right of the man who tills the land to own the land; the right of the workers to join together to seek better conditions of labor; the right of businessmen to use ingenuity and foresight to produce and distribute without arbitrary interference in a truly competitive economy. — Robert Kennedy

In abdicating responsibility throughout God's kingdom at large, Christians have created a cultural vacuum of labor, influence, and leadership which the ungodly have come in to fill. The fact of the matter is, someone is going to exercise rulership in the earth. If not the godly, then the ungodly. If the righteous retreat completely, they have no reason to be surprised when they wake up one day to find their inheritance usurped by those who do not know God. — Christian Overman

The times today are too dangerous for the young and the smart to be not bothered. Know the truth. Remember, "We can deny the truth. But, we can't avoid it." We have been there; we have all been there. Ask a female friend who is fighting for a better pay scale, ask the father of an immigrant who is nervous about the future of his daughter, ask a gay friend who is fighting for the right to marry, ask an African-American friend who wants her younger brother to be unafraid and proud, ask a homeless worker in Bangladesh whose house just got swept by rising sea levels, ask a young child in Beijing who breathes an air polluted by fossil fuels, ask a child labor in India who works ten hours and twelve hours to get two square meals a day. And, when you ask, you will know. You will know why we need to take it personally. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

Components are how people solve problems above a modest scale; it's one thing that separates us from chimpanzees. We invented a way of solving problems by simply making it the other guy's problem. It's called specialization of labor, and it's as simple as that. That's how the humans differ from chimpanzees: they never invented that. They know how to make tools, they have a language, so for most of the obvious things there are no differences between chimps and humans. We discovered how to solve problems by making it the other guy's problem - through an economic system. — Brad Cox

I'm in love with you," he said quietly.
"Augustus," I said.
"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you. — John Green

And I am glad to know that there is a system of labor - where the laborer can strike if he wants to! I would to God that such a system prevailed all over the world. — Abraham Lincoln

You in the unions do not yet represent all of labor. But I hope some day you will, because I believe that it is through strength, through the fact that people who know what people need are working to make this country a better place for all people, that we will help the world to accept our leadership and understand that, under our form of government and through our way of life, we have something to offer them ... — Eleanor Roosevelt

I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day ... was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep. — Charles Bukowski

Having worked as a labor and delivery nurse ... I've seen ultrasounds ... you know that those babies are real. — Naomi Judd

You know, rural Americans are a special people. Their labor puts food on our table and fuel in our gas tanks. Their service in our military sets a powerful example of leadership, honor and sacrifice. Their spirit of community inspires us all. — Tom Vilsack

A bum woke up in the gutter right beside where I stood looking across the street at this place. He felt in the waist of his pants and came up with a pint bottle, half full. He tipped it up and it gurgled steadily until he'd emptied it all down into him. I was only twenty-four or -five but I already knew from experience how it tasted. And people who've kissed the feet of Christ know how it tasted. I saw everything there in the gutter
the terror and the promise. Later I spent the morning in the smoky Day Labor Division with better than a hundred men who'd learned how not to move, learned how to stay beautifully still and let their lives hurt them, white men with gray faces and black men with yellow eyes. I worked the rest of the week in a factory without ever comprehending exactly what was manufactured there, and at night I'd get drunk and shut myself in a phone booth and call the woman in Minnesota who'd broken my heart. — Denis Johnson

American labor rights activist, on activities of the National Farm Workers Association Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may. — Frederick Douglass

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know-
Although they do not talk of it at school -
That we must labor to be beautiful. — W.B.Yeats

Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we've committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I'm deep in my own. To say "going through the motions" - this isn't reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort - the labor, the motions, the dance - of getting inside another person's state of heart or mind. — Rebecca Skloot

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

I want labor to be the point, because everything in our lives is miraculously made with no idea of how it's done. As an active and critical consumer, and as someone who has attempted to make the flawless and failed, I wanted a transparency of construction here. If we know how it is made and how it falls apart, we will know how to rebuild it. — Tom Sachs