The study of vain things is laborious idleness. [ Proverb ]

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,
(That last infirmity of noble minds,)
To scorn delights and live laborious days. [ Milton ]

By diligent and laborious examination of things past, we may easily foresee things to come. [ King ]

The virtue of widows is a laborious virtue: they have to combat constantly with the remembrance of past bliss. [ St. Jerome ]

Lovely, far more lovely, the sturdy gloom of laborious indigence than the fawning simper of thriving adulation. [ Goldsmith ]

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. [ Bruyere ]

What laborious days, what watchings by the midnight lamp, what rackings of the brain, what hopes and fears, what long lives of laborious study, are here sublimized into print, and condensed into the narrow compass of these surrounding shelves! [ Horace Smith ]

Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and laborious attentions to little objects which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence is thought (and not unjustly) incapable of greater matters. Cardinal de Retz very sagaciously marked out Cardinal Chigi for a little mind, from the moment he told him that he had wrote three years with the same pen, and that it was an excellent good one still. [ Chesterfield ]