Laborious Quotes & Sayings

There is no discussing theology, sociology and politics when someone is under the spell of a self-enclosed totalitarian ideology. Intentionally or out of ignorance, Ahmed, who is empirical in all matters, detests pointless and laborious philosophical imaginings, never-ending discussions, or clashes of ideas that might be respectful of non-believer opponents and sinners deserving only of complete contempt. — Elie Wiesel

The studio part, to me, can be pretty laborious. You're inside for hours on end and can be pretty frustrating to get the sound you hear in your head to come out of those speakers. — Mike Love

The architecture of the Minotaur's heart is ancient. Rough hewn and many chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps - the blood it has pumped for five thousand years, the blood it will pump for the rest of his life - is nearly human blood. It carries with it, through his monster's veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur's world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it. — Steven Sherrill

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills. — Jorge Luis Borges

Go before the people with your example, and be laborious in their affairs. — Confucius

Nothing is so much coveted by a young man as the reputation of being a genius; and many seem to feel that the want of patience for laborious application and deep research is such a mark of genius as cannot be mistaken: while a real genius, like Sir Isaac Newton, with great modesty says, that the great and only difference between his mind and the minds of others consisted solely in his having more patience. — John Todd

The Knights' Code," which he had learned by heart from Scouting for Boys, a book he frequently turned to in times of uncertainty, even now in his self-exile from the movement, demanded that "Chivalry requireth that youth should be trained to perform the most laborious and humble offices with cheerfulness and grace." He supposed entertaining Izzie was one of those occasions. It was certainly laborious. — Kate Atkinson

Although a firm swat could bring a recalcitrant child swiftly into line, the changes were usually external, lasting only as long as the swatter remained in view ... Permanent transformation had to be internal ... The habits of self discipline, as laborious and frustrating as they were to achieve, offered the only real possibility of keeping children safe from their own excesses as well as the omnipresent dangers of society. — Mary Blakely

She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this construction of the present. — Virginia Woolf

A great number of the women are victims to falling of the womb and weakness in the spine; but these are necessary results of their laborious existence, and do not belong either to climate or constitution. — Fanny Kemble

He is ever inglorious
His laugh is laborious
His smell is notorious
Impale the herring king! — Shannon Hale

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn't turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it. — Chila Woychik

The working of miracles is old and out-dated; to teach the people is too laborious; to interpret scripture is to invade the prerogative of the schoolmen; to pray is too idle; to shed tears is cowardly and unmanly; to fast is too mean and sordid; to be easy and familiar is beneath the grandeur of him, who, without being sued to and intreated, will scarce give princes the honour of kissing his toe; finally, to die for religion is too self-denying; and to be crucified as their Lord of Life, is base and ignominious. — Erasmus

Writing was always a laborious thing for me. I never wrote fluently, I never wrote fluidly, there was something very awkward in my writing. But it seemed to me purposely awkward. It's almost as if I made the labor part of writing. — Vito Acconci

No man ever was glorious, who was not laborious. — Benjamin Franklin

In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1943, as America went about the rumbling, laborious business of backing itself into a horrible war. — Michael Chabon

This much is true: When we created the euro, it wasn't possible to create a political union along with it. People weren't ready for that. But since then, they've grown more willing to go in that direction. It's a process, one that is sometimes laborious and sometimes slow. But it's important to keep the populations involved. — Wolfgang Schauble

Science is an inherent contradiction - systematic wonder - applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming's eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it - a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria - and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory? — Thomas Lewis

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business. — W.G. Sebald

Mansions once
Knew their own masters, and laborious hinds,
That had surviv'd the father, serv'd the son.
Now the legitimate and rightful lord
Is but a transient guest, newly arrived,
And soon to be supplanted. He that saw
His patrimonial timber cast its leaf,
Sells the last scantling, and transfers the price
To some shrewd sharper ere it buds again. Estates are landscapes, gazed upon awhile,
Then advertised and auctioneer'd away. — William Cowper

To find the best moves great Masters, with years of experience, engage in laborious research, and the moves thus found are blindly repeated by amateurs without any attempt to fathom their real meaning and how and why they stand in their context. — Eugene Znosko-Borovsky

Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues. — Samuel Johnson

I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it. — Yann Martel

The process of reading a book takes a while to get used to (in this future society). It's so slow and laborious. But once you get into it, once you forget the way you're reading and concentrate on what you're reading, it becomes a really unique experience. You have to work to draw meaning from it rather than having a meaning given to you. It doesn't tell you how to think. — Mike A. Lancaster

I got better the way everyone gets better: by trial and error and error and error, by fumbling around and making mistakes but not giving up and working incredibly hard at it every day and eventually, through a painful and laborious process of eliminating every wrong turn, finding my way. — Mishka

When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him ... It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward ... Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time ... the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life. — Leo Tolstoy

Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities. — Thomas Carlyle

The idea presented itself definitely to his mind that it was in his power to exchange the dreary, artificial, idle, and individualistic life he was leading for this laborious, pure, and socially delightful life. — Leo Tolstoy

How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. (What's Wrong with the World) — John Eldredge

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. — Anais Nin

By concentrating our attention on the effect rather than the causes, we can avoid the laborious, nearly impossible task of trying to detect and deflect the many psychological influences on liking. — Robert Cialdini

My dear, the duty that devolved wholly on you in my absence of guiding and expanding the minds of our dear children is a laborious one and a responsible one. — Ezra Cornell

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. — Evelyn Waugh

Her thoughts pulsated through him, frantic, desperate, pleading for him to stay behind.
"I won't - can't," he murmured. "If you're going, so am I."
She exhaled a laborious sigh and flung her arms around his neck; her warm breath fanned over his skin as she tightened her grip. "If you die, Andrew, I'll track you across multiple dimensions just to say I warned you," she cautioned, voice tender. — Laura Kreitzer

Housekeeping is not beautiful; it cheers and raises neither the husband, the wife, nor the child; neither the host nor the guest;it oppresses women. A house kept to the end of prudence is laborious without joy; a house kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious. — Anton Chekhov

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles. — Samuel Johnson

Philosophical progress changes what we take to be "intuitively" obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes. We don't see these changes, because we see with them. — Rebecca Goldstein

I train three, four, five times a week, protein six times a day, resistance training for at least 45 minutes ... it's so very boring. It's really painful. It's laborious. — Gwendoline Christie

In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear. — William Hazlitt

If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [of gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind (Chapter 65,p. 68) — Edward Gibbon

[They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks. — Diane Setterfield

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted Shepherd's trade, And strictly meditate the thankless muse; Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life. — John Milton

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself - and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense. — Neal Stephenson

The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination. — Franz Kafka

You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality, which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in a humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy. — Edmund Burke

Here on the river I have known peace and beauty such as I never knew in any other place. There is always work here that I need to be doing and I have many worries, for life on the edge seems always threatening to go over the edge. But I am always surprised, when I look back on times here that I know to have been laborious or worrisome or sad, to discover that they were never out of the presence of peace and beauty, for here I have been always in the world itself. — Wendell Berry

Therefore, doing the Stations of the Cross was still more laborious than consoling, and required a sacrifice. It was much the same with all my devotions. They did not come easily or spontaneously, and they very seldom brought with them any strong sensible satisfaction. Nevertheless the work of performing them ended in a profound and fortifying peace: a peace that was scarcely perceptible, but which deepened and which, as my passions subsided, became more and more real, more and more sure, and finally stayed with me permanently. — Thomas Merton

The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself. — Edward McKendree Bounds

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea! — C. G. Jung

There is no employment in the world so laborious as that of making to one's self a great name; life ends before one has scarcely made the first rough draught of his work. — Jean De La Bruyere

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. — G.K. Chesterton

'Alpha' is a very fast-moving book. It doesn't lend itself to laborious introspection and the navel-gazing that some stories can fall prey to. — Greg Rucka

The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including, consequently, those which one believed to be least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire, and sometimes ceased to live. — Marcel Proust

By multiplying the means of gratification, by promoting the introduction and circulation of the precious metals, those darling objects of human avarice and enterprise, it serves to vivify and invigorate the channels of industry, and to make them flow with greater activity and copiousness. The assiduous merchant, the laborious husbandman, the active mechanic, and the industrious manufacturer,-all orders of men, look forward with eager expectation and growing alacrity to this pleasing reward of their toils. — Alexander Hamilton

Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions. — Deborah Eisenberg

The virtue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was of a severer and more laborious kind. It was the well-earned harvest of many a learned conference, of many a patient lecture, and many a midnight lucubration. At the age of twelve years, he embraced the rigid system of the Stoics, which taught him to submit his body to his mind, his passions to his reason; to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all things external as things indifferent. — Edward Gibbon

Transformation and deliverance are most definitely laborious!!! — Denise Sharp

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The process of truly learning is laborious, monotonous, and at times down right bitter and boring. Therefore, obtaining a truly higher education will require of you a determined mind and a will to stick and stay. In short, it will take discipline. But in the end, it will be worth it all. — Daniel Whyte III

Indifference is a form of sloth. For one can work hard, as I've always done, and yet wallow in sloth; be industrious about one's job, but scandalously lazy about all that isn't the job. Because, of course, the job is fun. Whereas the non-job
personal relations, in my case
is disagreeable and laborious. — Aldous Huxley

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse. — Robert Adams

Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondriac, and that a diseased body. No laborious person was ever yet hysterical. — Thomas Jefferson

We have not fully recovered from the Dark Ages: the insecurity that excites greed, the fear that fosters cruelty, the poverty that breeds filth and ignorance, the filth that generates disease, the ignorance that begets credulity, superstition, occultism - these still survive amongst us; and the dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions only awaits opportunity or permission to oppress, kill, ravage, and destroy. In this sense modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism, which secretly remains; and in every generation civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority. The — Will Durant

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land. — Aldo Leopold

When the Promise of American life is conceived as a national ideal, whose fulfillment is a matter of artful and laborious work, the effect thereof is substantially to identify the national purpose with the social problem. — Herbert Croly

But however mysterious is nature , however ignorant the doctor, however imperfect the present state of physical science , the patronage and the success of quacks and quackeries are infinitely more wonderful than those of honest and laborious men of science and their careful experiments. — P.T. Barnum

At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. — Aldo Leopold

Loving is a laborious and complex business. — Mahbod Seraji

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony. — Horace Walpole

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill. — H.L. Mencken

Stubbornly unsolved, and of the laborious and ongoing task of decipherment and translation. For the curious amateur, — Alison Croggon

Beaten biscuits: This is the most laborious of cakes, and also the most unwholesome, even when made in the best manner. We do not recommend it; but there is no accounting for tastes. Children would not eat these biscuits-nor grown persons either, if they can get any other sort of bread. When living in a town where there are bakers, there is no excuse for making Maryland biscuit. Believe nobody that says they are not unwholesome ... Better to live on Indian cakes. — Eliza Leslie

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day. — Winston S. Churchill

Day after day, O lord of my life, shall I stand before thee face to face. With folded hands, O lord of all worlds, shall I stand before thee face to face.
Under thy great sky in solitude and silence, with humble heart shall I stand before thee face to face.
In this laborious world of thine, tumultuous with toil and with struggle, among hurrying crowds shall I stand before thee face to face.
And when my work shall be done in this world, O King of kings, alone and speechless shall I stand before thee face to face. — Rabindranath Tagore

Free yourself from the poisonous and laborious burden of holding a grudge. When you hold a grudge, you want someone else's sorrow to reflect your level of hurt, but the two rarely meet. Let go ... Sometimes, forgiveness is simply a reflection of loving yourself enough to move on. — Steve Maraboli

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary. — Jorge Luis Borges

I'm not saying I didn't have a great 2008. I just made it a chore. I made it look laborious. — Katie Hoff

In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, — Anthony Trollope

There was, I think, a feeling that the best science was that done in the simplest way. In experimental work, as in mathematics, there was 'style' and a result obtained with simple equipment was more elegant than one obtained with complicated apparatus, just as a mathematical proof derived neatly was better than one involving laborious calculations. Rutherford's first disintegration experiment, and Chadwick's discovery of the neutron had a 'style' that is different from that of experiments made with giant accelerators. — John Ashworth Ratcliffe

My child,you are broken. Unless you know that you are broken yourself,it will be severely laborious to love the broken people around you. You will be harsh and exacting towards them. But because you want others to like you, you will always attempt to hide your weaknesses from others. Let me strip away your masks,so that you may know who you really are.And when this truth sets you free,then shall you be free to genuinely love. Before this occurs,your love will be offered by the flask,not by the torrents of a river. — Bo Sanchez

My hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration ... are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now. — Margaret Atwood

As the taste for what may be called book-learning increases, manual labor should not be neglected. The education of the mind and the education of the body should go hand in hand. A skillful brain should be joined with a skillful hand. Manual labor should be dignified among us and always be made honorable. The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow among us ... Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone. Our children should be taught to sustain themselves by their own industry and skill, and not only do this, but to help sustain others, and that to do this by honest toil is one of the most honorable means which God has furnished to His children here on earth. The subject of the proper education of the youth of Zion is one of the greatest importance. — Wilford Woodruff

Labor Day is a holiday honoring those who work for a living. Laborious Day is a lesser known holiday honoring those who cannot stop talking about their work. — Daniel Handler

I'd like to propose to you that revelation is not the product of laborious study, but it is the fruit of friendship with God. — Kris Vallotton

She says I shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing.
Well! This is one side of the story, to be sure, but I look at the other. Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ's name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother's heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest! — Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit. — Adam Smith

Pleasure is by much the most laborious trade I know, especially for those who have not a vocation to it. — Hannah More

The institutional arrangement whereby most professional economists are heavily burdened with teaching and administrative duties may militate against a sufficient admixture of the more laborious forms of statistical and field work. — Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod

The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse. — Francis Bacon

Generations cometh and generations passeth, but the earth abideth forever. While successive generations live and die, and all things change, man can never rest until death claims us. I choose to use my time alone to contemplate human existence, probe the human condition, and trace what it means to be one man in our modern world. There can be no profit from my labor, no lasting yield realized from this laborious and painful sojourn. We will leave everything behind. The earth shall dissolve all of our acquisitions and obliterate all traces of our petty affections. Passage of time shall alter, not annihilate the products of any artistic labors. The substance of our artistic enterprises shall continue forward in a renewed and redefined state. — Kilroy J. Oldster

There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall 'inherit the earth.' Neither covetous men, nor the grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess. — John Ruskin

I do seem to try to make things harder and harder for myself. In some perverse way, obstacles interest me and I'm drawn to projects that end up being incredibly laborious. — Taryn Simon

If the majority of the "spiritual market" is drawn to prerational magic and myth, how do you reach the small group who are involved in genuine, laborious, demanding, transrational spiritual practice? This is very difficult, because both markets are referred to as "spiritual," but these two camps really don't get along very well-one is mostly translative, the other is mostly transformative, and they generally disapprove of each other-so how do you put them into one magazine without alienating them both? — Ken Wilber

A novel which has been too much worked over often goes flat, and no amount of laborious revision can take the place of careful planning beforehand. — Sheila Kaye-Smith

Praise Him, each savage furious beast
That on His stores do daily feast;
And you tame slaves, of the laborious plough,
Your weary knees to your Creator bow. — Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl Of Roscommon

The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses to work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. — Georges Bataille

What history teaches us is that man does not change arbitrarily; he does not transform himself at will on hearing the voices of inspired prophets. The reason is that all change, in colliding with the inherited institutions of the past, is inevitably hard and laborious; consequently it only takes place in response to the demands of necessity. For change to be brought about it is not enough that it should be seen as desirable; it must be the product of changes within the whole network of diverse casual relationships which then determine the situation of man. — Emile Durkheim