Tuesday, 22 April 2025

LIFE IS LABOUR

 

          LIFE IS LABOUR

            We are destined to to do some sort of labour throughout our life. To sit idle is to commit a sin.

 

Labour is work, toil, activity, employment and exertion. It is the mother of one’s luck and prosperity. To shun labour and spend our time like an idler is to invite poverty.

 

            The Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) said:

Blessed is the man that has found his work. One monster there is in the world, the idle man.

           

            Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) , a cleric in the Church of England, said:  

 Avoid idleness, and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and useful employment; for lust easily creeps in at those emptiness where the soul is unemployed and the body is at ease; for no easy , healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but of all employments, bodily labour is the most useful, and of the greatest benefit for driving away the Devil.     

 

            According to the American orator and statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852 ): Labour is one of the  great elements of society ---the great substantial interest on which we all stand.  No feudal service, or predial toil, or the irksome drudgery by one race of mankind subjected, on account of their colour, to another; but labour, intelligent, manly, independent, thinking and acting  for itself earning its own wages, accumulating those wages into capital, educating childhood and  maintaining worship, claiming the right of the elective francise, and helping to uphold the great of the State ---that is American labour.

 

            The Greek poet Sophocles (495-406 B.C.) said: Without labour nothing prospers.

           

            Finally, this quote  by the French writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778):

                Labour rids us of three great evils ----irksomeness, vice, and poverty.

                                                            *******

G.R.Kanwal

22 April 2025

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